Is it possible to publish an unpackaged Windows App SDK (WinUI 3) as self contained single file?

Question

I'm pretty sure I have all the right flags and everything set according to Microsoft Docs, however the UI dlls are not being included in the single file exe.

Answer 1

AFAIK, you can't. Self-Contained does not mean One-Single-File . It means that all the dependencies will be next to your EXE so you won't need to install runtimes to the target device.

Answer 2

Try using https://github.com/Fody/Costura/

It's great for legacy .NET projects. Newer frameworks have single-file executables as shown in their documentation

Answer 3

Yes - with this (unpackaged / self-contained) command line:

dotnet publish -f net6.0-windows10.0.19041.0 -c Release -p:WindowsPackageType=None -p:SelfContained=true -p:WindowsAppSDKSelfContained=true

Note: This requires Windows App SDK 1.1.0 or above.