Changing an assembly's manifest without re-building

Question

In .NET, is there a tool or some other method which would allow us to modify an assembly's manifest, without having to modify the AssemblyInfo and re-build the assembly?

Thanks

Answer 1

You could use the IL disassembler/assembler tools as described here:

Editing an assembly's manifest and more...

Answer 2

You can use a binary editor to modify the manifest. I've used UltraEdit to open dlls and modify the manifest. It is a plain text section of the PE file - usually located near the end of the file.

Also, you typically can not use this method to add to the assembly. It is safe for changing bytes but not adding or removing. The equivalent of removing bytes from the assembly would be to replace characters with the space character - so that the total number of bytes is unchanged.

Answer 3

You can use MT.exe. It ships with the SDK. There is a good explanation of how to use it here.