I just spent several days trying to make .Net do something it apparently cannot do. Basically I wanted to have several .exe assemblies, with some common code. Generally you can do this by putting the common code in either a .dll or a .netmodule. For example, common.dll or common.netmodule, and prog1.exe, prog2.exe, prog3.exe, etc. For deployment you need to make common.dll available to prog1, prog2, prog3 etc by a variety of means. For common.netmodule, the file must be in the same directory as the programs that call that module.
According to Junfeng Zhang’s Windows Programming Notes, back in .Net 2.0 the link.exe command was able to combine .netmodule files into a common assembly, but that capability, it seems, is no longer supported by .Net any more. Sadly, Microsoft’s documentation on this is quite abstruse, so it took me several days to figure out that was impossible. I even tried installing the .Net 2.0 SDK, but I could find no way to install it under Windows 8.1.
Ultimately, I really did not want to deploy more than one file, so I had to find another way to do what I wanted. As much as I did not want to, the simplest solution was to set up my Maven build to copy the common source code into each module (subproject). As it turns out, this works quite well, but it really is a hack.
In general I find that developing software for Microsoft platforms, such as .Net, to be much more difficult, time consuming, and frustrating than for Java. I really only needed to develop a small amount of special code for windows because I needed a way to get around Windows UAC for my Java and Scala automated unit tests.