How to remove reference to unused assembly inside Dependencies/Frameworks/Microsoft.NETCore.App?

Question

. 。 Answers to this question are eligible for a +100 reputation bounty. Athari wants to to this question: ：

I guess bounty on every question is the only way.

There're assemblies inside .NET 6 framework which I'm 100% sure I'll never use, however they still appear in the list of dependencies, ReSharper (and likely bare VS as well) still suggests them when importing types, and in general their existence is annoying.

For example, I'm 100% sure I'll never use Microsoft.Win32.Registry or System.Drawing , yet when writing Color I see IDE suggesting types I can't really use. I'm abandoning my Windows-only ways and I want to never see these again.

I tried pressing Delete after selecting the node, nothing happened. I tried adding <Reference Remove="System.Drawing" /> to my.csproj file, nothing happened. I tried using "Remove unused references", nothing happened.

Question: Is there any way to get rid of these references? Removing them from the list would be perfect, but just hiding them from suggestions of VS/R# would be fine too.

I've found multiple questions regarding removing references on SO, but they all seem to be about .NET 4.x, about adding an alternative, all this not being useful for my case.

VS2022 17.0.1, R# 2021.3 EAP, .NET 6.0, latest everything.

Answer 1

These assemblies are called MetaPackages and you can't delete them. This is a similar question that may help you: How to remove extra reference from Microsoft.AspNetCore.All Meta package

Answer 2

You cannot remove it there, but after your project is built you can "treeshake" all unused parts with some tools. Most obfuscators have a function for that purpose and I believe ILMerge also has a switch to trim unused types.

Note that if you use reflection allot, you risk getting TypeLoadException's when types are removed that have no static reference but are always loaded dynamically through reflection.

In.Net 6 you can use Visual Studio to publish your project to a folder, choose self-contained and in the file publishing options you will find "produce single file". This will prune any unused framework dependencies.