Make single portable exe

[mcdonamw]

Apologies to post this in Issues but you do not have a discussions area. I just ran across this product and looks really useful. I do not like installing applications and much prefer portable apps, so I downloaded your zip file. Works great.

However, I wonder (I'm not a developer), if it's possible for you to distribute this software as a single portable application/exe vs a folder containing a bunch of supporting files?

[activescott]

No need to apologize. Thank you for reaching out! It is also a reasonable question. I think it is possible using an approach as described at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/single-file/overview

However for me personally it is not a priority. If someone wanted to explore it I’d be willing to consider it. Some things to note for any developers who want to take it on for me to accept it:

• the process of building must be 100% automated in the existing msbuild script run on the appveyer CI
• the size of the result has to be reasonable. I think it should exclude the framework since modern windows includes it and we have clear guidelines already on OS versions that we support (see readme).
• Lessmsi currently depends on some platform dependent native libraries that may make this challenging (wix & libmspack).
• It would be published on the GitHub releases page, but not in chocolatey

If anyone does decide to take this on happy to provide advice or help.

If other users are interested in the future, I suggest voting for this issue or leaving a comment.