Sean Blakemore's Blog

Background

ILMerge is a great tool for merging .NET assemblies, when we want to deploy an application as a single executable file we can merge in the dependencies and we’re good to go.

Unfortunately ILMerge doesn’t work on WPF applications because according to the ILMerge page on Microsoft Research:

They contain resources with encoded assembly identities. ILMerge is unable to deserialize the resources, modify the assembly identities, and then re-serialize them.

More...

Let’s just dive right in and have a demo to see what we’re trying to accomplish. Below is a Silverlight application with some interesting behaviour, if you start changing any data the application will notice and the save button becomes enabled, the state of the form is ‘dirty’. That isn’t very interesting on it’s own, what is interesting is that if you then put the data back to the way it was when you started, the save button becomes disabled again and the form returns to the ‘clean’ state. Here, have a play…