[Mono-devel-list] merging two assemblies and related problems

[Zoltan Varga]

                                       Hi,

  If you find strange bugs when running something under mono, while it
works under MS.NET, please report it at bugzilla.ximian.com.

                           Zoltan

On 5/20/05, Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimirv at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've brought up this problem in the past, but i'm again trying to find
> a decent solution for this using mono.  The problem is pretty
> straightforward:  I have two assemblies, A.dll and B.dll.  A.dll is
> autogenerated using System.Reflection.Emit; B.dll is compiled from C#
> source.  A.dll needs to access a custom attribute class that's defined
> in B.dll.  So far, here are the approaches that I've tried, and the
> problems I've encountered:
> 
> 1) Use ILMerge (http://research.microsoft.com/~mbarnett/ilmerge.aspx).
>  Works great; binary only, Windows only.
> 
> 2) Use PERWAPI (http://www.plas.fit.qut.edu.au/perwapi/Default.aspx).
> It seems to work under .NET 1.1 on windows; under mono 1.1.7 I see
> strange bugs (usually an infinite loop as it's trying to write an
> assembly out on anything but the simplest assemblies).  It also balks
> on some mono-generated assemblies, usually finding non-zero values
> where it was expecting to just read zeros.
> 
> 3) Use RAIL (http://rail.dei.uc.pt/).  A simple test of
> RAssemblyDef.LoadAssembly("foo.dll").SaveAssembly("bar.dll") results
> in:
> ** ERROR **: file reflection.c: line 835 (method_encode_clauses):
> assertion failed: (ex_info->handlers)
> 
> 4) Use monodis on both A.dll and B.dll, massage the output a bit, and
> reassemble with ilasm -- basically remove the extern reference from
> A.dll to B.dll, remove the foreign assembly reference from the custom
> attribute usage in A.dll, and tack on most of B.dll's disassembly to
> the end.  The problem here is that A.dll uses the "calli" instruction,
> and monodis/ilasm can't round-trip the calli signatures... the output
> has: "IL_0008:  calli signature-0x11000001", signature-0x11000002, and
> so on.  ildasm appropriately balks.
> 
> Is there a #5 that I'm missing that I haven't tried?  Out of the above
> problems, fixing monodis/ilasm to round-trip signatures would probably
> be the most straightforward, though that's the least elegant solution.
>  Fixing the assertion failure with RAIL may or may not be difficult; I
> haven't looked into what exactly is happening in much detail.  PERWAPI
> might be making too many assumptions about the PE files it operates
> on, and may be failing  due to .NET-only quirks.
> 
> A final last-ditch effort may be to just use S.R.E to generate the
> classes/methods that B.dll provides directly into A.dll.  Maybe I
> could use Cecil to read B.dll and generate appropriate output using
> S.R.E.?
> 
> Any ideas would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
>     - Vladimir
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