Is it good practice to create a Wix installer that brings along multiple third-party DLLs?

Question

Relatively new developer here working on a C#/.NET Windows app. When executing a particular script, the application requires several third-party DLLs:

• Autofac.dll (the next two are dependencies of this one)
• Microsoft.Bcl.AsyncInterfaces.dll
• System.Threading.Tasks.Extensions.dll

I've added all three of these Dlls to the Product.wxs so that they exist in the application folder after installation, but is there anyway to avoid this?

Just looking for some guidance as to what the best practice would be.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Depends. You should not ship assemblies that ship in the .NET Framework. However, with .NET Core the philosophy changed and now you can depend on the runtime or ship everything yourself.

And yes, shipping all the files yourself means keeping up with the servicing. It's a tradeoff where the .NET team gets more flexibility (breaking changes isolated to when you take a new drop) vs global safety on a computer (with breaking changes when the Framework is updated).