Merging .NET assemblies with ILMerge
I was speaking with one of the senior developers here about moving some of the various projects that exist in the server solution into one project, such that there would only be one assembly .DLL file that needed to be distributed with each component, ie “Library.dll”, or even just a packed single executable file that included the libraries.
Apparently you can do this and still keep your projects separate in your solution.
ILMerge is a utility that can be used to merge multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly. ILMerge takes a set of input assemblies and merges them into one target assembly. The first assembly in the list of input assemblies is the primary assembly. When the primary assembly is an executable, then the target assembly is created as an executable with the same entry point as the primary assembly. Also, if the primary assembly has a strong name, and a .snk file is provided, then the target assembly is re-signed with the specified key so that it also has a strong name.
Looks neat.
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