ILmerge support and other assembly manipulation.

[pabloko]

Hello, anyone has ever tried to use ILmerge to combine a lot of resulting assemblies into a compact assembly and transform it to dll library?

Also, any assembly manipulation like code obfuscators fails always.

Its possible to process normally the assemblies then make the build task?

Regards

[3F]

I just looked at this public issue again after answering the latest email-question; Too close :)

Okay, Here's deal:

• About how to use ILMerge or ILRepack together with our .NET DllExport 1.7: https://twitter.com/GitHub3F/status/1230164176187936769

• About obfuscators, my today's reply (copy-paste):

I personally not tested any obfuscators with our DllExport (there was just no need) but for any case we can talk only about POST-processing stage for this tool.

Means that any 3rd party tool will just destroy our related PE modifications.

Thus, the only possible way ~ [ Module -> {3rd tool} -> .NET DllExport ]
...

For obfuscators, you only need to try to disable at least attribute modifications when external libraries or even some specific.
Some obfuscators allows this and it could be very similar to my example with ILMerge above.

[pabloko]

hello @3F would you mind to post a link? cant find reference on your tweet. many thanks

[3F]

@pabloko,

o_0 I think this is a correct full url to my tweet that was mentioned earlier:

https://twitter.com/GitHub3F/status/1230164176187936769

Or what "reference on your tweet" do you mean?

You can also read my complete log with details here:

• https://ko-fi.com/post/ILMerge-and-other-related-3rd-party-tool-for--NET-Y8Y71FVU4

upd:
Ah yes, for the convenience I also added sample of code while I was writing note above. Find here: https://gist.github.com/3F/b651430f601c99e9f10abf3a8482d3e3

copy-paste:

<!-- https://ko-fi.com/post/ILMerge-and-other-related-3rd-party-tool-for--NET-Y8Y71FVU4 -->

...
  <!-- For .NET DllExport 1.7 -->

  <Target Name="Merging" BeforeTargets="DllExportMod">
    <Copy SourceFiles="$(DllExportMetaLibFullPath)" 
          DestinationFolder="$(TargetDir)" 
          SkipUnchangedFiles="true" 
          OverwriteReadOnlyFiles="true" />

    <Exec Command="$(ILMergeConsolePath) Conari.dll $(TargetFileName) /out:$(TargetFileName) /ndebug"
          WorkingDirectory="$(TargetDir)"
          ContinueOnError="true" />
    
    <Delete Files="$(TargetDir)$(DllExportMetaLibName)" ContinueOnError="true" />  
  </Target>

  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Conari" Version="1.4.0" />
    <PackageReference Include="ilmerge" Version="3.0.29" />
  </ItemGroup>  
...

[3F]

ILMerge is officially supported in our tool, starting with planned 1.7.1:

Full Details: https://ko-fi.com/Blog/Post/ILMerge---Conari---Debug-information---DllExport-=-O5O61MV8A