ILMerge Best Practices

Question

Do you use ILMerge? Do you use ILMerge to merge multiple assemblies to ease deployment of dll\'s? Have you found problems with deployment/versioning in production after ILMe

Answer 1

It seems to me like the #1 ILMerge Best Practice is Don't Use ILMerge. Instead, use SmartAssembly. One reason for this is that the #2 ILMerge Best Practice is to always run PEVerify after you do an ILMerge, because ILMerge does not guarantee it will correctly merge assemblies into a valid executable.

Other ILMerge disadvantages:

• when merging, it strips XML Comments (if I cared about this, I would use an obfuscation tool)
• it doesn't correctly handle creating a corresponding .pdb file

Another tool worth paying attention to is Mono.Cecil and the Mono.Linker [2] tool.

[2]: http:// www.mono-project.com/Linker