Merge Only Telerik Assemblies into WPF Executable

[Alan]

Some people on here are probably familiar with this blog entry about Merging Telerik's Assemblies into an WPF executable. We actually decided to take a completely different spin and wanted to just merge the Telerik assemblies only leaving all our others untouched (our program as a plug-gable module architecture so we can't merge ALL assemblies). I'm not sure if any one else would be interested in this but I wanted to post it anyway just to get it out there that it is possible. 

MSBuild AfterResolveReferences:

<Target Name="AfterResolveReferences">
  <ItemGroup>
    <EmbeddedResource Include="@(ReferenceCopyLocalPaths)" Condition="$([System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex]::IsMatch(%(ReferenceCopyLocalPaths.Filename), 'Telerik')) And '%(ReferenceCopyLocalPaths.Extension)' == '.dll'">
      <LogicalName>%(ReferenceCopyLocalPaths.DestinationSubDirectory)%(ReferenceCopyLocalPaths.Filename)%(ReferenceCopyLocalPaths.Extension)</LogicalName>
    </EmbeddedResource>
  </ItemGroup>
</Target>

Program.cs:

namespace WpfApplication1
{
    using System;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.Linq;
    using System.Reflection;

    public class Program
    {
        [STAThreadAttribute]
        public static void Main()
        {
            var assemblies = new Dictionary<string, Assembly>();
            var executingAssembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
            var resources = executingAssembly.GetManifestResourceNames().Where(n => n.StartsWith("Telerik")).Where(n => n.EndsWith(".dll"));

            foreach (string resource in resources)
            {
                using (var stream = executingAssembly.GetManifestResourceStream(resource))
                {
                    if (stream == null)
                        continue;

                    var bytes = new byte[stream.Length];
                    stream.Read(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
                    try
                    {
                        assemblies.Add(resource, Assembly.Load(bytes));
                    }
                    catch (Exception ex)
                    {
                        System.Diagnostics.Debug.Print(string.Format("Failed to load: {0}, Exception: {1}", resource, ex.Message));
                    }
                }
            }

            AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve += (s, e) =>
            {
                var assemblyName = new AssemblyName(e.Name);

                var path = string.Format("{0}.dll", assemblyName.Name);

                if (assemblies.ContainsKey(path))
                {
                    return assemblies[path];
                }

                return null;
            };

            App.Main();
        }
    }
}

We also did an additional spin with a PostBuildEvent of deleting the Telerik files after the build.

PostBuildEvent:

  <PropertyGroup>
    <PostBuildEvent>del /F /Q "$(TargetDir)Telerik*"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)de"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)es"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)fr"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)it"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)nl"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)tr"</PostBuildEvent>
  </PropertyGroup>

I hope someone else finds this useful as we did.

[Vlad]

Hi Alan,

 Thank you very much for sharing your solution! I've added 5000 Telerik points to your account.

Regards,
Vlad
Telerik

[Alan]

Update:

Apparently I was a bit too trigger happy on the PostBuildEvent that deletes the Telerik objects. I forgot to account that some of the dlls have XML manifests (and I haven't figured out how to load those from embedded resources properly) so here's an updated PostBuildEvent that only focuses on the dlls.

  <PropertyGroup>
    <PostBuildEvent>del /F /Q "$(TargetDir)Telerik*dll"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)de"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)es"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)fr"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)it"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)nl"
rmdir /S /Q "$(TargetDir)tr"</PostBuildEvent>
  </PropertyGroup>