Dynamically change namespace and assembly name

Question

Basically, I developped a small library with some common fonctionnalities that I use in all my projects. For some political reasons, I cannot choose a generic name for that library (including namespace and assembly name). Usually, it must include the name of the enterprise, something like this for the namespace: Enterprise.ProjectName.XXX.YYY.

For the moment, I'm doing a copy of my library, then I'm renaming the namespaces manually with Visual Studio, and finally I'm recompiling the whole thing. So my question is the following: Is it possible to create a small program that takes an assembly as input, rename all namespaces from MyLibrary.XXX.YYY to Enterprise.ProjectName.XXX.YYY as well as the assembly name?

What are the steps to follow?

[Edit]

Generating the assembly automatically seems to much work. I will use resharper and/or CTRL+ALT+F like I did so far. Thanks for the answers...

Answer 1

Some options:

1. If you are copying the entire source code for your library into your new project, you can use a refactoring tool like Resharper to "Adjust Namespaces". This is a pretty quick and safe refactoring.

2. If you just need to avoid shipping the internally named assembly, you may be able to use ILMerge to 'hide' the internal assembly during a post-build step. This is viable if it's just a perception issue for the final assembly names in the binary output directory.

3. Deal with the issue at the political level by describing your internal library as being no different from any other third-party dependency. Then the naming is no longer a problem. This may solve other problems if you're shipping the source code of this library to multiple clients, as it clarifies that you are not giving full ownership of your 'shared' code to each client. Otherwise they could potentially argue that you are not allowed to use that 'shared' code in projects for other clients, since it is clearly owned by them, having their enterprise name in the namespace.

Answer 2

You could use Mono's Cecil project to disassemble the assembly, inspect each type, rename or recreate the type with a new namespace, and generate the resulting assembly.

That being said, it might be simpler to use a tool like Resharper which allows you to rename namespaces correctly within the code base.