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I have a .Net application which has a very large set of native dlls and misc. binary dependencies (200+mb and upwards of 1,000 files).

Is there a standard acceptable way to manage these dependencies and drag them in at once for a .Net application? Since the dependencies are not .Net dlls, they simply need to be copied to the bin directory as opposed to "referenced" from the projects.

As of right now, I have a couple of different thoughts:

  • Nuget package which packages the content files (very large package).
  • Startup script that downloads the dependencies as needed from some known location (also would allow dynamic updates given this method)

Any insight would be appreciated.

Ryan Griffith
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    Using a NuGet package (or more, if you find a way to group the native dependencies by i.e. functionality or another criteria) will only help you to manage the dependencies at build time. You will get an application ready to run with all the dependencies it needs, same as if you copied the dependencies to `bin` manually. The package encapsulates this minimal deployment logic and can help you with versioning. On the other hand, if your concern is what happens when you redistribute this application then the NuGet package cannot be reused. This should be handled by your app's installer logic. – Suiden Jul 27 '19 at 21:09

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