ILMerge - use wildcard and specify main assembly

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I have main assembly MyAssembly.dll and a lot of libraries which I want to merge into main assembly. Because there are lots of them, I wanted to include them all using wildcard, something like this:

ILMerge.exe /wildcard /allowDup /out:MyAssembly.Merged.dll MyAssembly.dll *.dll

The problem with this approach is that it merges MyAssembly.dll twice, resulting in duplicated type names, so need to use /allowDup option. But this option renames duplicated types, and I don't want that (my DLL is a plugin for other application and all types must have original names). I could omit MyAssembly.dll in command line, but because ILMerge merges assemblies alphabetically, it treats the first one as a main assembly (for example Autofac.dll) which results in final assembly having wrong metadata (version etc.). Is it possible to exclude certain assembly name with wildcard option?

ilmerge .net c#
1 Answers

Is it possible to exclude certain assembly name with wildcard option?

No. You could write a batch file that builds the command line though, using for for example. You could also write a script in another language.

However ilmerge is an artefact of the past and it has a whole slew of problems. Since it copies the code into one assembly it changes how run-time loading works, which can easily break lazy-loaded programs like WPF or ASP.NET Core.

Nowadays we have .Net5 which provides first-class support for single-assembly binaries, both that run under the installed environment (like your assembly used to need) or self-contained (it includes the .net5 runtime as well). It doesn't mash together the code into one assembly, it sticks to separate assemblies loaded at run-time directly from your generated large "assembly", so your actual code doesn't change.

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