ASP.Net MVC 2 - Merge all outputs to a single assembly

Question

I have a Web Deployment Project in my solution. The solution consists of the MVC2 App and another Class Library.

In the Web Deployment Project properties I have the Merge all outputs to a single assembly option ticked and I have given it a name.

When I look in the bin folder I have all my reference DLL's from my MVC app, a DLL with the name of my MVC project and then a DLL by then name I gave it when choosing the Merge all outputs to a single assembly option.

I imagined this option would create 1 DLL not all DLL's plus another one.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

As the documentation states it: this option merges all the output assemblies from the compiler into a single assembly. This setting is equivalent to the -o assemblyname option of the aspnet_merge.exe command. Remember that web deployment project allows you to pre-compiles a web application. This is to avoid having multiple temporary assemblies for the different aspx pages which is more common to web sites and not web applications. This doesn't in any case merge with third party assemblies you are referencing in your site like class libraries.