Lars Holm Jensen's Code Blog

Here’s a very quick and dirty way to include managed dlls in your .exe-file. Just right-click your project in Visual Studio, choose Project Properties -> Resources -> Add Resource -> Add Existing File…

Add all your dependencies and finally include the code below in your App.xaml.cs or equivalent.. everything else is taken care of.

public App()
{
    AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve +=new ResolveEventHandler(CurrentDomain_AssemblyResolve);
}

System.Reflection.Assembly CurrentDomain_AssemblyResolve(object sender, ResolveEventArgs args)
{
    string dllName = args.Name.Contains(',') ? args.Name.Substring(0, args.Name.IndexOf(',')) : args.Name.Replace(".dll","");

    dllName = dllName.Replace(".", "_");

    if (dllName.EndsWith("_resources")) return null;

    System.Resources.ResourceManager rm = new System.Resources.ResourceManager(GetType().Namespace + ".Properties.Resources", System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());

    byte[] bytes = (byte[])rm.GetObject(dllName);

    return System.Reflection.Assembly.Load(bytes);
}

The code is a little bit more complicated than need be. But I wanted to avoid using a named namespace in order to keep the code copy-paste-ready. By the way LINQPad uses a similar method, though Joe Albahari has gone a step further and encrypted his resources.