Hi..
I've been searching for some time now on howto include DLL's in an executable, and the only real lead I could come up with was this post from the p2p.wrox-forums:
http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=7539
(I own the "Beginning VB.NET 2003" but nothing of this sort is mentioned in the book).

Basically, I want to include some DLLs because I wish to minimize the files in the root and /bin directories (also, they musn't be accessible to the end-user). The post mentions "Global Assembly Cache" (GAC - I believe), but where do I read about this, because the process sounds as if it's a bit of a hazzle?
And btw: I'm on a beginning/moderate level, so plz be gentle :D

You can't hide one assembly (DLL) inside of another one (DLL/EXE) to the best of my knowledge. The only thing you could do is put all the code you need within a single EXE.

Yes, the GAC is a hastle and it doesn't hide/protect your assembly. In fact it makes it accessible to the entire machine. I'm not a beginner and I stay away from the GAC. I've yet to find a necessary use for it.

Are you looking at a way to obscure your assembly code/logic? There are obfuscation tools around that make the contents of an assembly harder to reverse engineer. Perhaps this is what you should look into. There is one that comes with Visual Studio.Net called Dotfuscator. I haven't used it so I can't shed any more light on it.

-Peter

>Are you looking at a way to obscure your assembly code/logic? There >are obfuscation tools around that make the contents of an assembly >harder to reverse engineer.

Yes there's a good obfuscation and anti-reverse tool EXECrytor www.strongbit.com