Getting a list of all dependencies from a .NET Standard project's csproj

Question

Ever since I've been using the (relatively) new .NET Standard Library project type in Visual Studio, I've been having some problems getting a complete set of DLL files that are required by my project.

The problem is usually limited to 3rd-party libraries which I reference as NuGet packages. I've noticed that these don't get copied to the output folder of my project when I build it. This didn't use to be the case in classic project types.

While I can appreciate the de-cluttering effect that this change has brought for .NET Standard projects, I'm now faced with a problem. I sometimes absolutely need to be able to get the entire list of all files that my project depends on!

I have several different cases, where I might require this list for one reason or another, but the one I believe is most crucial for me, is when I want to gather these files from the csproj itself, right after it's built. In there, I have a custom MSBuild <Target> which should take all the files from the output dir and zip them together for distribution. The problem is, I'm missing all the files that come from NuGet dependencies, because they're not there!

How can I solve this in a general (ie not project-specific) way?

UPDATE

There's this deps.json file that contains basically all I'm after and then some. It's just a matter of extracting the relevant information and find the files in the local NuGet cache. But that would involve writing a specialized app and calling it from my target. Before I start writing one myself... Is there something like this already out there somewhere?

Answer 1

I followed this answer and it sort of works.

The suggested thing was to include the following into my csproj:

<CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies>true</CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies>

My main concern is that it also outputs some other DLLs from the framework (such as System.Memory.dll and System.Buffers.dll , among others), which I didn't expect. But maybe that's a good thing. They do seem to be dependencies, just not direct ones. I'll see how it plays out.

If it turns out ok, my only wish would be that this directive was more prominently displayed in project settings (as a simple checkbox, maybe?) so I wouldn't have to hunt the web to find it.