Can I specify supportedRuntime (or any other config parameter) without a .config file in .net?

Question

I have a WinForms app that should be really easy to deploy with just and .exe file. It uses framework 2.0, and so it does not work on Windows 8 by default. If I include a .config file with the following parameters, it works fine on W8:

<configuration>
  <startup>
    <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0,Profile=Client"/>
    <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727"/>
  </startup>
</configuration>

However, now I have to deploy two files and this is not acceptable. Is there some thing I can do to "embed" those parameters into the exe itself?

I have tried using WinZip self extractor, but it's not an option either, because I cannot customize its interface.

Answer 1

.NET executable contains small piece of native code, which is intended to load appropriate CLR version into a process.

Loader calls shim (MSCOREE.DLL, .NET executable has native dependency from this DLL) to load CLR (CLRCreateInstance in v4).
Content of <startup> configuration element is processed by the shim.

This means, you can't process <startup> element in managed code, because there's no CLR (and any managed code) at this moment. The only way is to write your own CLR host. I think, it is much easier to ship your application with config file, or build a version for .NET 4/4.5.