.Net 6 publish produces both an exe and a dll and self-contained does too much

Question

I'm publishing a .Net 6 application for win-x64 with many dependencies, and i notice the publish generates two files: a MyApp.exe and MyApp.dll. From what i understand it's a choice that comes from the multi-platform nature of .Net, but in my scenario i now have two files to deploy and update instead of one.

I've tried self-contained publish, but it bundles also the dependencies and bugfix updates will have to download many MB for just the main exe change.

Is there a way to bundle together only MyApp.exe and MyApp.dll without the dependencies?

Answer 1

You can add PublishSingleFile true in your .csproj

<PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net6.0</TargetFramework>
    <PublishSingleFile>true</PublishSingleFile> 
    <SelfContained>true</SelfContained>
    <RuntimeIdentifier>win-x64</RuntimeIdentifier>
    <PublishReadyToRun>true</PublishReadyToRun>
  </PropertyGroup>

Or pass it in during the command line publish

dotnet publish -r win-x64 p:PublishSingleFile=true --self-contained true