How to precompile C# assembly?

I just found a link to a very detailed article on NGEN: http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/archive/2005/09/01/3512.aspx

FYI

I don't think it's possible, Alan, to run ngen directly from Visual Studio.

There's no compiler or linker switch which would allow ngen to be run as the final part of the build process and, even if there was, you'd still have to run ngen on every client machine to install the native image in its GAC as you said yourself.

However, what you can do is to use a custom dll to automate installation on other machines. This article by Bob Powell describes how to do this (there is a switch to change from VB to C# code) and, although it was written for use with the .NET 1.1 version of ngen, I don't see why it shouldn't work with .NET 2.0 if you change the references appropriately:

http://www.bobpowell.net/prejit.htm

Thanks for the reply, but my question was how to make Visual Studio do the precompiling. 

As I understand it, NGEN must be run on EVERY user's machine to put the assembly in the GAC.  This complicates the installation process, and it seems like a better solution if Visual Studio does the precompiling once.  Unfortunately, Microsoft has made it very difficult to obtain this information.  (Maybe they're so proud of JITing they don't want people bypassing it.)

ngen.exe is in fact a command line utility so you  have to leave Visual Studio itself and open a command window to use it.

If you have VS 2005 then from the desktop click:  Start -> All Programs-> Microsoft Visual Studio 2005-> Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio Command Prompt.

You'll then need to navigate to where your .NET executable resides and call ngen. As you'll probably know already from reading the docs, the basic command is something like:

ngen install myapp.exe