R – Dlls unloading order in Unix and Windows

I highly recommend to use Costura.Fody - by far the best and easiest way to embed resources in your assembly. It's available as NuGet package.

Install-Package Costura.Fody

After adding it to the project, it will automatically embed all references that are copied to the output directory into your main assembly. You might want to clean the embedded files by adding a target to your project:

Install-CleanReferencesTarget

You'll also be able to specify whether to include the pdb's, exclude certain assemblies, or extracting the assemblies on the fly. As far as I know, also unmanaged assemblies are supported.

Update

Currently, some people are trying to add support for DNX.

Update 2

For the lastest Fody version, you will need to have MSBuild 16 (so Visual Studio 2019). Fody version 4.2.1 will do MSBuild 15. (reference: Fody is only supported on MSBuild 16 and above. Current version: 15)

Assuming you do not want to terminate the thread when unloading the library (otherwise, see MSalters), you need to free the library from the caller that loaded it.

COM solves that by an in-DLL instance counter (much like yours, if I understand you correctly), and regulary checking it by calling a global exported CanUnloadNow function.

Another option is to have your object/interface smart pointers ALSO reference the DLL they came from. This would increase the client data size, but you wouldn't need to touch the DLL. You might even recycle the LoadLibrary/FreeLibrary reference counter, however that might hit performance.

Also, none of these schemes help much if you get circular DLL dependencies (Component DllA.X references DllB.Y, which references DllA.Z). I haven't yet fould a good solution to that that doesn#t requrie global knowledge.