How to compile a .NET application to native code?

Microsoft has an article describing how you can Compile MSIL to Native Code

You can use Ngen.

The Native Image Generator (Ngen.exe) is a tool that improves the performance of managed applications. Ngen.exe creates native images, which are files containing compiled processor-specific machine code, and installs them into the native image cache on the local computer. The runtime can use native images from the cache instead using the just-in-time (JIT) compiler to compile the original assembly.

Unfortunately, you still need the libraries from the framework in order to run your program. There's no feature that I know of with the MS .Net framework SDK that allows you to compile all the required files into a single executable

As some of the other answers here have mentioned, you can use the .NET Native tool to compile your app to native machine code. Unlike those answers, however, I will explain how to do it.

Steps:

1. Install the dotnet CLI (command line interface) tool, which is part of the new .NET Core toolchain. We'll use this to compile our app; you can find a good article about it here.

2. Open up a shell prompt and cd to the directory of your app.

3. Type this:

   dotnet compile --native
   

That's it! When you're done, your app will be compiled down to a single binary, like this:

It'll be a standalone executable; no PDBs, assemblies, or config files included (hooray!).

Alternatively, if you want an even faster program, you can run this:

dotnet compile --native --cpp

That will optimize your program using the C++ code generator (as opposed to RyuJIT), so your app is even more optimized for AOT scenarios.

You can find more info on this at the dotnet CLI GitHub repo.

RemoteSoft makes a tool that compiles a .NET application into a package that can be run without .NET installed. I don't have any experience with it:

RemoteSoft Salamander

Microsoft has announced its .NET Native Preview that will allow to run .NET applications without having the framework installed.

Take a look: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/04/02/announcing-net-native-preview.aspx

FAQ: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/dn642499.aspx

You can download Microsoft .NET Native for VS2013 from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/dotnetnative