How to hide dlls that I install from users view

Question

Hello: I am developing an application that has a lot of support dll's. some suppoting dll's, some component dll's.

I install my application into Program Files, but if you were to open up the install location, it looks pretty ugle, just becasue its a long list of dll's.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to not have them to end-users view? Can I put them in some kind of cab file or some kind of container so users only see a single file? Can I still use the dll's at runtime if they are packed in a container?

Open to suggestions.

BTW, the program is in C#, using some managed dll's and unmanaged dll's.

thanks DC

Answer 1

For the managed DLLs you have a couple of options:

• Use ILMerge. ILMerge has a nice GUI interface that can be found here
• Embebed them as a resource, see this article for details.

Answer 2

ILMerge is what you are looking for.

ILMerge is a utility that can be used to merge multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly. ILMerge takes a set of input assemblies and merges them into one target assembly. It works on executables and DLLs alike and comes with several options for controlling the processing and format of the output.

PS: Don't think it merges unmanaged code though.