August 18, 2005

Microsoft offers tool to combine .Net assemblies

ILMerge utility provides integration when developers use different languages

Microsoft is offering an upgraded version of its ILMerge utility, which merges multiple .Net assemblies into a single assembly.

Functioning with both executables and DLLs, ILMerge provides a capability for .Net assemblies that is analogous to combining multiple Word documents into a single document, according to a Microsoft representative.

Someone, for example, may want to deploy a single file to others but half the development team uses Visual Basic and the other uses C#. Neither Visual Studio 2003 nor the upcoming 2005 release of Visual Studio have the inherent capability to combine two assemblies written in different languages.

Packaged as a console application, ILMerge takes a set of input assemblies and merges them into a single target assembly, according to Microsoft. Its functionality also is available programmatically.

ILMerge is a “power toy for developers,” said analyst Greg DeMichillie, of Directions on Microsoft.

“If you're building a complex .Net application, you will probably have built it as several assemblies, maybe one [for] the user interface and one for the core logic. This tool lets you combine those into one file which can then be copied, installed, [and] deployed,” DeMichillie said. 

ILMerge functions with Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Windows XP. It currently will not work with Mono, which is a Unix-based, open source version of the .Net development platform.

Paul Krill is an editor at large at InfoWorld.
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