Unmanaged Native Library dependency

[Ba-I-T-o]

I built a .net project with C# using ExcelDna. My C# code depends on my C++ library via interop ([DllImport...]). How to set up .dna to add my native library to have a complete packed xll?

[govert]

At the moment we don't support packing of native libraries when targeting .NET Framework.
(For .NET 5+, we do pick these up from the deps.json file and pack them.)

For .NET Framework, you can try to embed the native .dll file as a resource in your .NET assembly, then at runtime save it to a real file somewhere, and load it with LoadLibrary before the first code with the [DllImport] gets loaded (I think the runtime looks for the native .dll when the class is JIT compiled).

It is a feature we could add to .NET Framework, but there are some awkward aspects, like deleting the file when the add-in closes. For managed assemblies, we can load purely from memory, so that's much more elegant.

[Ba-I-T-o]

Thank you so much for your answer. So you said that if I'm targeting .Net6 all I need to do is to add the .dll names in the deps.json. No need to reference them in the .csproj? Enabling the native packaging ?