At work, I started building a .net assembly that would probably find its way into a number of the server processes and applications around the shop. This particular assembly was going to end up containing quite a number of external open source references that I didn’t want to expose to the consumer of my library.
I set out to solve several simple requirements.
Easy to use. Should be nothing more than adding a reference to the assembly (and use it).
Consumer should not have to deal with the 5 open source libraries it was dependent on. Those are an implementation detail and it’s not necessary to expose those assemblies to the consumer, let alone have to manage the assembly files.
I originally got the idea from Dru Sellers’ post http://codebetter.com/blogs/dru.sellers/archive/2010/07/29/ilmerge-to-the-rescue.aspx
I gave ILMerge a try. As a post build event on the project – I ran ILMerge and generated a single assembly. Leveraging the internalize functionality of ILMerge so my assembly wouldn’t expose all of its open source projects through Visual Studio’s intellisense.
This almost gave me the output I wanted. Single assembly, compact, easy to use… Unfortunately, when I tried to use the assembly I started seeing .net serialization exceptions. Serialization from my ILMerged assembly could not be desterilized on the other end because that type was not in an ILMerged assembly, but in the original assembly. (Maybe there’s a way to work around this, but I didn’t have time to figure that out, would love to hear any comments)
So ILMerge appeared to be out, what next?
My coworker, Shawn, suggested I try storing the assemblies as resource files (embedded in my assembly). He uses the SmartAssembly product from Red Gate in his own projects, and mentioned that their product can merge all of your assemblies into a single executable – storing the assemblies in a .net resource file within your assembly/executable. This actually seemed easy to accomplish so I thought I’d give it a try.
How I did it.
Step 1: Add the required assemblies as a resource to your project. I choose the Resources.resx file path and added each assembly file to the Resources.resx. I like this because of how simple it is to get the items out.
Step 2: We need to hook up to the first point of execution (main(…), or in my case this was a library and I had a single static factory class, so in the static constructor of this factory I included the following lines of code.
Read more: <elegantc*de>
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