Single-file deployment not building in WPF project

Question

I am trying to merge all of my DLLs and other dependencies into a single file application for a WPF project. This is not a .NET Core application. I am using Visual Studio 2017 Community on a Win 10 Pro system.

Apparently, ILMerge will not work for this. After some research, I came across (what seems to be) a very simple solution.

Single-file deployment
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/single-file/overview?tabs=cli

I've added the following tags into my .CSPROJ file and rebuilt the application. The executable is indeed generated without any errors, but it does not contain the DLLs. I do not get an error message, so I have no idea as to what went wrong.

Any assistance with this would be appreciated.

<PropertyGroup>
    <PublishSingleFile>true</PublishSingleFile>
</PropertyGroup>

Answer 1

Hi,@Wally96333. Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

If you are using Visual Studio 2017 and are trying to create a single-file deployment for your WPF.NET Framework project, you might encounter limitations.

It doesn’t work with .NET Framework based projects. According to this thread: Publish a single file app does not create a single file and this link(.NET 5), you may need to use .NET 6 or higher versions of .NET to make it work.

Based on my test, by using .NET 6, if you choose framework-dependent to publish, you will get two files(.exe, .pdb). If you choose Self-Contained to publish, you will still get some (not a single file) files.

For more information on single file deployments, you could refer to Single-file deployment.

---

If the answer is the right solution, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.