如何确定 WiX 安装所需的 .NET Core 3.1 运行时文件

Question

I have a suite of 6 .NET Core 3.1 Windows desktop applications that I build into a common binary directory. Studio / MSBuild has populated that directory with various supporting DLL's. I'm working on the Wix installer uplift next.

How do I know which of these extra DLL's are required for running my application and must be in the MSI? (Wix installer) At the moment I'm including all of them. Maybe some aren't needed? Maybe another "appears" when I make a change to one of my DLL's. As a former "Framework" application, I packaged "my stuff", the rest was automatically part of the .NET framework. Now with .NET Core 3.1 there are these extra files.

Note, I'm packaging all the JSON files but maybe some of these are optional too?

Answer 1

It doesn't seem like this question has anything to do with WiX, but more with the way you are publishing your .NET Core applications. I assume you are using self-contained deployment where "The output publishing folder contains all components of the app, including the .NET libraries and target runtime."

If you need to deploy .NET Core runtime with your application (self-contained deployment) you could do the following things to reduce the number of files being deployed:

• trim self-contained deployment
• bundle all application-dependent files into a single binary (PublishSingleFile)

The alternative is to use framework-dependent deployment model (which also supports PublishSingleFile option).