Comments on: Explorer Suite update

By: Brandon Siegel

Brandon Siegel — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:21:05 +0000

Bruce: Try ILMerge (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mbarnett/ilmerge.aspx)

–Brandon

By: Daniel Pistelli

Daniel Pistelli — Tue, 25 May 2010 10:59:51 +0000

I’m sorry Bruce, but I have no time at all. I’m heavily working on IDA and have little time for anything else.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:01:16 +0000

Hey Daniel
I am a heavy user of your products, especially cff explorer and phoenix protector. I am a .net developer. My company is looking for a linker that links system assemblies in the exe to avoid dependency on the framework. Xenocode is too expensive for us. if you can develop such a tool we are ready to pay up to 600 bucks for that. Please let me know if you can do this. We would really appreciate this.

By: Daniel Pistelli

Daniel Pistelli — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:27:48 +0000

I understand, they do the same thing the Salamander Linker does. I explained this technique throughoutly in one of my former articles. As I mentioned in the article I was not interested in developing such a thing since deploying a subset of the framework is not only horrible, but isn’t guaranteed to work with future versions of the framework. Is it even legal to deploy a subset of the framework?
That being said I understand your need for the version 3.0+ on pre-Vista, but I doubt that deploying 40 mb of framework is a real solution.

By: jeff

jeff — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:03:24 +0000

From the Xenocode website : “Native executable generation: Postbuild allows for the creation of a native x86 executable allowing your application to run, with or without a .NET Framework installed. Required portions of a third-party .NET Framework payload are automatically selected and embedded into the executable, dramatically reducing the complexity of application testing, deployment, and support. Postbuild automatically identifies and statically binds a minimal set of Framework dependencies, reducing overall deployment size and eliminating dynamic link costs”.
As I understand ILmerge only merges application level assemblies. Our apps run are required to run on a clean XP machine . We have no problem running on Vista and later since .net 3.0+ is already there. Thanx again for your attention.

By: Daniel Pistelli

Daniel Pistelli — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:34:10 +0000

From what I can understand, you already tried ILMerge and it didn’t work out for you. Right?
Developing such a tool would take at least a week and the testing some more time, it’s improbable to work perfectly at once. I’ve never tried XenoCode but it’s impossible to remove framework dependency completely through only a merger.

By: jeff

jeff — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:48:32 +0000