ILMerge, over and over again

I can’t begin to understand why Visual Studio Magagzine’s Best of the .NET Blogosphere updates so infrequently … but as a result, I’m by now rather annoyed at their #1 article for the week: Embedded Assembly Linker

Although it’s a decent article on reflection, I don’t understand why it’s not only headlining that page, but it’s also been emailed to me in three different newsletters from FTPOnline (*ugh*, by the way, get fresh content already). Why does anyone really care so much about some guy who decided to go the hard way and do this manually.

Microsoft has been providing tools for merging assemblies since at least the beggining of 2004. ILMerge works on executables or dlls (yeah, you can merge several .NET DLLs into one) comes with options for controlling the processing and format of the output, is not .NET2 specific, and works without changes to your existing code — so you can still ship everything seperate as an option. Plus, there’s no (slow) runtime reflection needed.

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