msbuild and merging assemblies.md

You probably use ilmerge to merge assemblies for uploadding to dynamics.

The easiest way to enable this in visual studio is by adding the msbuild task ilmerge via nuget. nuget is essentially a fancy “macro” that does something to your project. It often just adds assemblies to your references list or adds a config file to manage some tool that also gets installed into your solution.

Once you do, nuget adds the ilmerge.dll and ilmerge.exe to the “packages” directory in your project. Do not forget to exclude these when you check them into github or another version control system. You can find instructions for adding the ilmerge task here: https://github.com/emerbrito/ILMerge-MSBuild-Task/wiki or through nuget directly https://www.nuget.org/packages/MSBuild.ILMerge.Task/.

An issue arises when you host your project files on a network drive. ilmerge will not work in the msbuild task because it is trying to merge assemblies that are on a network drive and .net does not allow this by default. .net has alot of security hassles in general that make life difficult, but this one is easy to overcome.

To overcome this, you need to realize that msbuild loads assemblies to execute tasks. Hence you need to adjust the permissions that msbuild runs with. msbuild is provided in visual studio’s installation directories. Assuming you have the appropriate permission, find the file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\MSBuild\15.0\Bin (use the proper VS version number for you, mine was 15.0) and adjust the MSBuild.exe.config file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
  <configuration>
    <runtime>
	    <!-- add this line anywhere in the runtime section -->
		 <loadFromRemoteSources enabled="true"/> 
...

ilmerge will now merge assemblies located at remote resources, such as a network drive, correctly. Maybe everyone knows this already, has another workaround, or maybe no one runs their projects on network shares or its already setup for them. I needed to make a modification for my development environment. I did not find a way to modify this permission globally using .net 4.5.

P.S. Don’t forget you still need to add the dynamics 365 SDK via nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.CrmSdk.CoreAssemblies/