At work, I am currently working on a small WPF app that we want to keep as a simple standalone exe. However, it has dependencies on several third-party assemblies: SharpZipLib, Unity, ServiceLocator, etc.
Microsoft has handy tool called ILMerge that merges multiple .NET assemblies into a single dll or exe. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support WPF applications, because of the way XAML is compiled.
Instead, you can use another approach — include all your referenced third-party assemblies as embedded resources of the exe:
public partial class App : Application{ private void OnStartup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e) { AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve += new ResolveEventHandler(ResolveAssembly); // proceed starting app... } static Assembly ResolveAssembly(object sender, ResolveEventArgs args) { Assembly parentAssembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); var name = args.Name.Substring(0, args.Name.IndexOf(',')) + ".dll"; var resourceName = parentAssembly.GetManifestResourceNames() .First(s => s.EndsWith(name)); using (Stream stream = parentAssembly.GetManifestResourceStream(resourceName)) { byte[] block = new byte[stream.Length]; stream.Read(block, 0, block.Length); return Assembly.Load(block); } }} |
Whenever .NET can’t find a referenced assembly, it will call our code and we can provide an Assembly instance ourselves. Note this code expects a sane DLL-naming convention 🙂
