Yes that is possible, you can produce an .exe which contains your application's assemblies but relies on the appropriate .NET runtime being present on the user's computer. You can also build a .exe which has the .NET runtime bundled, but it can be quite big. I made a simple program that wrote "Hello World" to the console [1] and it was between 46-78MB: https://blog.mclemon.org/no-this-is-what-peak-hello-world-lo...

Yeah, it's not really a "real" native binary.

You can get it down to 8kb by jettisoning all comforts: https://medium.com/@MStrehovsky/building-a-self-contained-ga... but that's not exactly practical.

Wow! Yeah indeed there's a few impractical steps required to go all the way to 8kb, but trimming down to a couple of MB is definitely a huge improvement. I somehow never looked into CoreRT before, I'm gonna need to do so. Thanks for sharing this!

You have to set up "dotnet publish" for the project that makes the executable.

It then makes a stub loader "your program.exe" which looks and behaves normally. You can then make it "self contained", which bundles the assemblies for you and transparently unpacks them.

You can have different publish profiles for the different targets.

.NET 5.0 can now create true single file that doesn't need any unpacking on first run (except on Windows where the Jit and GC dlls will live or be unpacked separately; but that should be resolved in .NET 6.0)

Yes, you can use ILMerge to merge all other DLLS into the main exe/dll: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8077570/how-to-merge-mul...

> Is it possible to create a single, stand-alone, self-contained .exe?

Yes.

It's possible but along with an .exe you'll get a couple of .dlls. Exe size will be 60+ Mb.