Rewrites .NET assemblies with Mono.Cecil, to allow two different versions of the same assembly to be referenced within an application.
It assumes that the assembly DLL name is the top level namespace and rewrites
- the top level namespace for all types within the assembly
- assemblies in the order of dependencies first
- IL
ldstr
op codes if they start with the namespace - compiler generated backing fields
This small program was written to allow different versions Elasticsearch .NET clients to be rewritten for benchmark comparisons. Your mileage may vary rewriting other assemblies :)
Distributed as a .NET tool so install using the following
dotnet tool install assembly-rewriter
dotnet assembly-rewriter
You can omit dotnet
if you install this as a global tool
Rewrite NEST, the Elasticsearch .NET high level client, version 6.2.0
assembly-rewriter -i C:/Nest.dll -o C:/Nest620.dll
Now, Nest620.dll
and another version of Nest.dll
can be referenced in the same project.
There's a small issue here however; both versions of NEST rely on Elasticsearch.Net.dll
, so we should also rewrite
this dependency at the same time, and update the references to Elasticsearch.Net within NEST to reference the new rewritten assembly
assembly-rewriter -i C:/Nest.dll -o C:/Nest620.dll -i C:/Elasticsearch.Net.dll -o C:/Elasticsearch.Net620.dll
Great! Now we can reference both in the same project.
If there are other direct dependencies that may version clash, these can be passed as well
assembly-rewriter -i C:/Nest.dll -o C:/Nest620.dll -i C:/Elasticsearch.Net.dll -o C:/Elasticsearch.Net620.dll -i C:/Newtonsoft.Json.dll -o C:/Newtonsoft.Json620.dll
You can check to see if everything expected has been rewritten using IL Disassembler
ildasm <rewritten>.dll /OUT=<rewritten>.il /NOBAR
Select-String -Path <rewritten>.il -Pattern '<original namespace>\.' -AllMatches | ft LineNumber,Line