Recommended Visual Studio config for referencing an assembly created with ILMerge
- by Daniel Schaffer
I have a solution in Visual Studio with 5 projects. They are:
Foo.Core: Core functionality
Foo.Api: Generated code built on top of core
Foo.Web: Web-specific extensions
Foo.Web.Mvc: MVC-specific extensions
Newtonsoft.Json: 3rd party library
I want to use ILMerge to merge Foo.Core, Foo.Api and Newtonsoft.Json into a single assembly, called Foo. That's the easy part.
The problem I'm running into is that Foo.Web and Foo.Web.Mvc both need to reference all three of the merged assemblies.
If I reference the original assemblies, they will have invalid references after I do the ILMerge.
If I reference the ILMerged assembly, I have to reference a debug assembly and then change it before I package everything up, which doesn't seem ideal.
I've tried creating a project called Foo, which references the 3 merged assemblies and replaces its own output with the ILmerged assembly, but that doesn't seem to work at all.
Is there a reliable way to do this?