When & How to use ILMerge with Visual Studio Project / Solution - visual-studio

Question

I'm developing a medium sized enterprise application.
There are many projects / solutions to this.
For example:
Company.Data
Company.Data.LinqToSql
Company.Entities (business objects)
Company.BLL
I then have some applications - for example a windows service:
MyWindowsService.
When i deploy this (by creating a setup project) it installs a load of DLL's from the output of the above mentioned projects.
Is this where i should be using ILMerge? to create one assembly.... Company.dll for example?
How would i go about integrating this into my build process?

Answer 1

The question ILMerge Best Practices
has good info on why.
When I use ILMerge, I use it to build a single DLL, to simplify deployment.
As to How, I define a separate, custom VS project, "Converged.csproj" if you like. In that .csproj file I define a custom Compile target. It is boilerplate code, that performs an ILMerge on all the referenced assemblies for the project.
It looks like this:
<Target Name="Compile">
<!-- Outputs="$(IntermediateOutputPath)$(TargetFileName)" -->
<!-- Outputs="$(TargetPath)" -->
<Message Text="Performing the Ilmerge." />
<!-- in this CreateItem stanza, we collect all the DLLs for the referenced projects -->
<CreateItem Include="#(_ResolvedProjectReferencePaths)">
<Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="AssembliesToMerge" />
</CreateItem>
<!-- This weird bit of hieroglyphics is the assemblies to merge, quoted, and separated by spaces -->
<!-- Example: "c:\foo\project1\bin\Debug\ProjectOne.dll" "c:\foo\project2\bin\Debug\ProjectTwo.dll" -->
<Message Text="AssembliesToMerge= #(AssembliesToMerge -> '"%(Fullpath)"', ' ')" />
<!-- Message Text="TargetPath= $(TargetPath)" / -->
<Message Text="TargetFileName= $(TargetFileName)" />
<!-- produce the merged assembly - putting the output in the "IntermediateOutputPath" eg obj\Debug. -->
<!-- it will be copied later by the CopyFilestoOutputDirectory task defined in Microsoft.Common.Targets -->
<Error
Text="ILMerge cannot be found. You need to download and install ILMerge in order to build DotNetZip."
Condition="!Exists('$(ProgramFiles)\Microsoft\Ilmerge\Ilmerge.exe')" />
<Exec Command=""$(ProgramFiles)\Microsoft\Ilmerge\Ilmerge.exe" /t:library /xmldocs /out:"$(IntermediateOutputPath)$(TargetFileName)" #(AssembliesToMerge -> '"%(Fullpath)"', ' ') " />
<!-- for some reason the XML doc file does not get copied automatically from obj\Debug to bin\Debug. -->
<!-- we do it here explicitly. -->
<Copy SourceFiles="$(IntermediateOutputPath)$(AssemblyName).XML" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)" SkipUnchangedFiles="true" OverwriteReadOnlyFiles="$(OverwriteReadOnlyFiles)" />
</Target>