BinaryFormatter.Deserialize “unable to find assembly” after ILMerge

Question

I have a C# solution with a referenced dll (also C# with the same .Net version). When I build the solution and run the resulting exe, without merging the exe and the refere

Answer 1

You can do this by creating and adding a SerializationBinder sub class that will change the assembly name before the deserialization happens.

sealed class PreMergeToMergedDeserializationBinder : SerializationBinder
{
    public override Type BindToType(string assemblyName, string typeName)
    {
        Type typeToDeserialize = null;

        // For each assemblyName/typeName that you want to deserialize to
        // a different type, set typeToDeserialize to the desired type.
        String exeAssembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName;


        // The following line of code returns the type.
        typeToDeserialize = Type.GetType(String.Format("{0}, {1}",
            typeName, exeAssembly));

        return typeToDeserialize;
    }
}

Then when deserializating add this to the BinaryFormatter:

BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
bf.Binder = new PreMergeToMergedDeserializationBinder();
object obj = bf.Deserialize(ms);