How to compile a .NET application to native code?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45702

  •  09-06-2019
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Question

If I want to run a .NET application in a machine where the .NET framework is not available; Is there any way to compile the application to native code?

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Solution

Microsoft has an article describing how you can Compile MSIL to Native Code

You can use Ngen.

The Native Image Generator (Ngen.exe) is a tool that improves the performance of managed applications. Ngen.exe creates native images, which are files containing compiled processor-specific machine code, and installs them into the native image cache on the local computer. The runtime can use native images from the cache instead using the just-in-time (JIT) compiler to compile the original assembly.

Unfortunately, you still need the libraries from the framework in order to run your program. There's no feature that I know of with the MS .Net framework SDK that allows you to compile all the required files into a single executable

OTHER TIPS

RemoteSoft makes a tool that compiles a .NET application into a package that can be run without .NET installed. I don't have any experience with it:

RemoteSoft Salamander

I have tested several of them and at this moment the only one that supports .NET 3.5 and also has a great virtualization stack is Xenocode Postbuild

With ngen you still need to have the .NET framework installed but using a tool as such all your managed code is compiled into native code so you can deploy it to machines without the framework presence.

Microsoft has announced its .NET Native Preview that will allow to run .NET applications without having the framework installed.

Take a look: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/04/02/announcing-net-native-preview.aspx

FAQ: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/dn642499.aspx

You can download Microsoft .NET Native for VS2013 from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/dotnetnative

As some of the other answers here have mentioned, you can use the .NET Native tool to compile your app to native machine code. Unlike those answers, however, I will explain how to do it.

Steps:

  1. Install the dotnet CLI (command line interface) tool, which is part of the new .NET Core toolchain. We'll use this to compile our app; you can find a good article about it here.

  2. Open up a shell prompt and cd to the directory of your app.

  3. Type this:

    dotnet compile --native

That's it! When you're done, your app will be compiled down to a single binary, like this:

Native compiled .NET Core EXE

It'll be a standalone executable; no PDBs, assemblies, or config files included (hooray!).

Alternatively, if you want an even faster program, you can run this:

dotnet compile --native --cpp

That will optimize your program using the C++ code generator (as opposed to RyuJIT), so your app is even more optimized for AOT scenarios.

You can find more info on this at the dotnet CLI GitHub repo.

Yes, using Ngen, the Native Image Generator. There are, however, a number of things you need to be aware of:

  • You still need the CLR to run your executable.
  • The CLR will not dynamically optimize your assemblies based on the environment it's run in (e.g. 486 vs. 586 vs. 686, etc.)

All in all, it's only worth using Ngen if you need to reduce the startup time of your application.

You can! However you're restricted to .NET 1.1 (no generics for you): Mono Ahead-Of-Time compilation (AOT)

However, this means compiling is really native, so you'll no longer be able to deploy one single bytecode assembly, you'll need one per platform.

It was originally designed because there's no .NET or Mono for iPhone, so that's how they made MonoTouch.

You can do this using the new precompilation technology called .NET Native. Check it out here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/dotnetnative

Currently it is only available for Windows Store Apps. It performs single component linking. So .NET Framework libraries are statically linked into your app. Everything is compiled to native and IL assemblies are no longer deployed. Apps do not run against CLR but a stripped down, optimized runtime called Managed Runtime (Mrt.dll)

As stated above, NGEN used a mix compilation model and relied on IL and JIT for dynamic scenarios. .NET Native does not utilise JIT but it does support various dynamic scenarios. Code authors would need to utilize Runtime Directives to provide hints to the .NET Native compiler on the dynamic scenarios they wish to support.

You can use ngen.exe to generate a native image but you still have to distribute the original non-native code as well, and it still needs the framework installed on the target machine.

Which doesn't solve your problem, really.

The nature of .NET is to be able to install apps that have been compiled to MSIL, then either by JIT or Ngen, MSIL is compiled to native code and stored locally in a cache. It was never intended on generating a true native .exe that can be run independently of the .NET framework.

Maybe there's some hack that does this, but it doesn't sound safe to me. There are too many dynamics that require the framework, such as: dynamic assembly loading, MSIL code generation, etc.

2019 Answer: Use dotnet/corert. It can compile .NET Core projects into standalone .exe files. No dependencies (except for system libraries like kernel32.dll). I bet this is exactly what the OP need.

From its GitHub home page:

The CoreRT compiler can compile a managed .NET Core application into a native (architecture specific) single-file executable that is easy to deploy. It can also produce standalone dynamic or static libraries that can be consumed by applications written in other programming languages.

I think it's not possible. You will need to distribute .NET FW as well. If you want to compile .NET app to native code, use NGen tool

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