Hi folks. I've got an assignment (at work) here to try and compile our software into a single DLL, or somehow speed it up. Previously I tried ILMerge (problems with it due to incompatible libraries, a couple thousand dlls, etc) and now with .net core 3.0 I suppose we're trying again. The problem is essentially that loading is very slow. We have a couple pages that take well over a minute to load. So I'm trying to come up with some thoughts to address the actual pain behind this assignment.

Some possible causes I've heard include the fact that we have so many dlls (that's the motivation for trying to compile into a single exe, and of course there's ease of deployment to clients) or the fact our software is still using DataSets. (we're a bit dated here, yeah) Compiling into Core 3.0 doesn't -really- seem to be helping so far, though I've only done a small sample project. (it'd take a lot of work, possibly a month or two manually or maybe a week or two if I can figure out a compile script, to get our entire application into Core 3.0, and we're still in the is-it-worth-the-effort analysis stage)

We're using .Net Framework 4.7 and DevExpress and some ancient anti-pattern that involves everyone doing each dll right from the front end to the back end SQL using datasets and data adapters, then calling up instances of custom controls into the main app.

This question is a bit lacking in details, but I don't know what else to offer, so please feel free to ask questions to help.