Mohammad Elsheimy 3:09 PM on February 16, 2009
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Merge your assemblies using ILMerge

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.

ILMerge is packaged as a console application. But all of its functionality is also available programmatically.

There are several options that control the behavior of ILMerge. See the documentation that comes with the tool for details.

The current version is 2.9.0210 (created on 10 February 2009). NOTE: There is no longer a version of ILMerge that runs in the v1.1 runtime.

The v2.0 version of ILMerge runs in the v2.0 .NET Runtime, but it is also able to merge v1 or v1.1 assemblies. However, it can merge PDB files only for v2 assemblies.

The v2 version of ILMerge was built with v2.0.50727 of the .NET Runtime. If you have an earlier version (e.g., Beta2 is v2.0.50215), then you need to use a config file: ILMerge.exe.config. (Copy the text from the browser and put into a file with that name. But check to see if you get any extraneous characters that the browser throws in. If so, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do.)

Currently, ILMerge works only on Windows-based platforms. It does not yet support Rotor or Mono.

If you use ASP.NET v2.0, then it provides a tool (based on ILMerge) to combine assemblies created during precompilation. You can get more details from the ASP.NET web site.

ILMerge Change History.

Download ILMerge (Current version is 2.8.0626):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=22914587-B4AD-4EAE-87CF-B14AE6A939B0&displaylang=en

Visit ILMerge Website:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mbarnett/ILMerge.aspx