AsmZip - Compressing and Hiding Assemblies/DLL's in your .Net EXE - Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

AsmZip - Compressing and Hiding Assemblies/DLL's in your .Net EXE

Francesco's blog - Compressing and hiding DLLs

"I like the ability to extend the power of my applications by simply adding a reference to an assembly that contains the functions or the controls that I need. I like much less, however, the need to distribute and deploy many DLLs together with my executables. In this post I show a technique that I use to compress (nearly) all the DLLs of a Windows Forms application and "merge" them with the main EXE.

All the files you need are in this ZIP archive, which contains the AsmZip.exe utility (which you run from the command prompt) and two source files, Unzipper.cs and Unzipper.vb. I suggest that you copy the AsmZip utility in a directory listed on the system path, to run it easily.
..."

An interesting deployment approach, sort of the same, yet different from, ILMerge.

I like that it compresses the DLL's, making the entire package smaller (but of course the EXE bigger).

The main EXE needs to be updated to include the provided UnZipper class (C# and VB.Net versions are provided)

For me, the most interesting thing about this is how it shows .Net's flexibility in loading assemblies.

(via /egilh - Compressing and hiding DLLs)