Install C# application on user system with system libraries

Question

I have created a C# 2010 application and now when I install it on user application it asks for complete dot net framework. Is it possible if I can only put required dll files with my application instead of installing complete dot net framework on user machine ?

Answer 1

No, this is not possible. In order to install and run an application targeting the .NET Framework, the user must have the appropriate version of the .NET Framework installed on his/her computer.

If you want to make things easier, you should distribute your application with a setup program that ensures the .NET Framework is automatically installed along with your app. There's no reason the user should have to download and install the .NET Framework themselves. You can even create a setup program right from Visual Studio, so there's no excuse not to use one. It also makes managing dependencies and versioning conflicts much easier.

If you're really worried about the size of your dependencies and are targeting .NET 4.0, you can require only the Client Profile, which is a subset of the .NET Framework optimized for client applications. You'll have to set your project's Properties to target the .NET 4.0 Client Profile, and ensure that you're not using any of the assemblies it omits.

I hardly recommend wasting too much time on this, though. At last count, the Client Profile was only about 15–16% smaller than the full version—not an amount that makes much difference on the fast Internet connections found in most parts of the world today. And even less of a problem if you distribute on real media.

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If you're absolutely dead-set on delivering an application without any dependencies (as comments to other answers suggest), you've got a hard road ahead of you. For starters, you'll need to drop .NET and C# entirely, and switch instead to an unmanaged language like C or C++. That's a very different programming environment than C#. Even if you're the best C# programmer in the world, there's going to be a significant learning curve to pick up C++.

And that still doesn't solve all of your problems. C++ applications compiled using a modern version of Visual Studio will still require that the appropriate version of the C Runtime Library be installed on the user's machine. This is, of course, a much smaller package than the entire .NET Framework, but you can't count on it always being there, so you'll need to install it along with your application.

Moreover, unlike the .NET Framework (which has WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, etc.) there is no GUI library bundled with C++. And if you choose any GUI library other than the native platform API (for example, Qt, which is quite popular for reasons that I still find inexplicable), that gives you an additional dependency. You mention Google's applications a couple of times as a model. Google Chrome targets the Win32 API directly and has written a bunch of their own code to draw their custom GUI on top of that base framework. That's really the only way you're going to eliminate dependencies entirely. And delay your app to market for a significant period of time.

Answer 2

No it is not possible

The .NET framework is more than just assembly to copy on the target computer. It is a more complex infrastructure that interact with the OS when an executable is loaded and, if it contains IL instruction, it compile it just in time in order to have it running. So non chanches in order to me to have it working without a .NET framework setup, that can be done in a separate step, or by creating a Setup for your app with the proper framework version indicated as a prerequisite. An overview of the framework can be found here, but many more others are available in the net, you should read it to understand why is not a just matter of functions you need or not.

Answer 3

You may choose to target .NET Framework Client Profile. That would decrease download size of .NET files. See this link for more details on subject: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc656912.aspx#targeting_the_net_framework_client_profile