#dotnet – Packaging my WinForm #OpenCV and #net5 app in a one-self contained file (Thanks @shanselman!)

Hi !

A couple of days ago, Scott Hanselman posted about a super cool feature (see references):

… you can make a single EXE that will run on any Windows Machine in two commands

How to make a WinForms app with .NET 5 entirely from the command line and publish as one self-contained file

and I was wondering, how this would work with my Winform tests with OpenCV. So, I pick up my Face Recognition using DNN app and decided to give it a try.

When I just build my Face Recognition using DNN app, it creates an output with

• 22 files
• 9 folders

Of course, including the Caffe model and the proto file. And I know, I can remove some unnecessary files, this is just for reference.

Back to Scott’s post, I decided to clean this and run the publish command

dotnet publish -r win-x64 /p:PublishSingleFile=true /p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true

And the output was amazing:

• My application (exe) self-contained file
• My ML Models, prototxt and caffe model
• OpenCVSharp dependency for Windows

This is great ! But wait, there is still an option here to PACK everything, that’s mean add the parameter IncludeAllContentForSelfExtract=True

dotnet publish -r win-x64 /p:PublishSingleFile=true /p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true /p:IncludeAllContentForSelfExtract=True

And, it really packs everything. However, it does not work in my default code. OpenCVSharp load the models from a physical location, and using the IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract option, the caffe model and prototxt are embedded as resources.

_netPose = CvDnn.ReadNetFromCaffe(PoseProtoTxt, PoseCaffeModel);
_netPose.SetPreferableBackend(Net.Backend.OPENCV);

There should be a trick here, for sure. I’ll spend some time to figure out, how we can load models directly from a single package app file!

References

• OpenCVSharp, https://github.com/s
• Scott Hanselman, How to make a WinForms app with .NET 5 entirely from the command line and publish as one self-contained file