Compress and pack your next .Net deployment with open source NETZ

Friday, September 04, 2009

Compress and pack your next .Net deployment with open source NETZ

“NETZ is a free open source tool that compresses and packs the Microsoft .NET Framework executable (EXE, DLL) files in order to make them smaller. Smaller executables consume less disk space and load faster because of fewer disk accesses.

Unlike other portable executable (PE) packers, .NETZ uses a pure .NET solution and it is written in C#. .NETZ can be used to pack .NET executables written in almost every .NET language.

.NETZ supports both .NET EXE and non-shared DLL files, and it is intended to pack .NET desktop applications. The compressed applications can be used in the same way as the uncompressed ones, transparently to the end user.

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NETZ - Download .NETZ

NETZ - .NETZ Help and Usage Examples

“For a quick start read Packing EXE Files and Creating a Single EXE File (EXE+DLLs), to pack together DLLs and the main EXE file into a single executable.

The .NETZ tool can be used to transparently compress .NET standalone EXE files and non-shared DLLs (with some limitations). For best results, download a version of .NETZ compiled for the version of .NET Framework that you are using.

.NETZ is a command-line tool. All examples below should be typed in a CMD window (or placed in a batch *.BAT file for your project, that can be run as a post-build step from within Visual Studio IDE).

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I came across this yesterday and thought it was pretty cool. The coolest in my mind was that the C# source is fully available.

And I’ve always liked the idea of combining my DLL’s into my EXE (i.e. ILMerge) to simplify deployment. XCopy is cool, but it’s even cooler if all you have to redist is a single EXE…

(cough… it would be coolest if Visual Studio had something like this, or just ILMerge, baked in… so that VS would, optionally, do the merging/packing/etc without us having to use a third party/external utility… cough… ;)