Patching after ILMerge

Question

We're looking into using ILMerge (along with NGEN.exe and GAC registration) to improve the startup times of our application.

It looks like we won't be able to merge all of the assemblies into one dll because it will prevent any patching of our application post-deployment. We've been using msimsp.exe to generate a patch which just replaces dll's that we need to update.

Is there a better way to patch our application that allows for consolidating dll's?

Anybody else have related experiences?

Answer 1

No answer, just a note about your approach. ILMerge can only make the cold-start of your program quicker. Less DLLs that the file system needs to find. Ngen.exe actually makes the cold-start worse, it doubles the number of files that need to be found. It can only improve the warm-start, skipping the JIT step. The GAC isn't good either, the files are stored in a large directory that won't be physically near the install location.