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I am developing a DLL (assembly) for later use in other .NET projects.

The DLL needs to be able to deploy a quite large directory structure with files (It's an offline copy of a website) to a local folder, selectable by the user.

These are currently 131 files in 65 directories. So adding them one by one to my resources is very hard. And they may change from time to time as new releases will come out.

Should I make a single ZIP and pack that? I would need to unzip at deployment, which needs extra code.

What is the best way to pack these files into the DLL and extract them to the same structure as when packed?

Note: This is quite similar to this question, but not with an EXE, thus the proposed solution there does not work for me.

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Marcel
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    Any installer creator tool supports this. Zip utilities can create self-extracting archives. Web sites are deployed with xcopy or tftp. Stuffing this in an assembly makes no sense, that's a hammer looking for a nail. – Hans Passant Feb 13 '13 at 20:59
  • @HansPassant Although your comment makes sense in general, I claim a special use case. My DLL is an API to a website, and that API should be able to create a copy of that website locally on the harddrive. The DLL may be used by various executables, thus I would like to have that with the DLL, not the executable or the installer for the executable. – Marcel Feb 14 '13 at 06:44

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