Question: How to configure project to always build as a "standalone app"

[mellinoe]

I'm looking at what it will take to port some of my projects onto the new SDK. My projects are already MSBuild-based, and just use a small set of properties and targets to get references, configurations, output paths, etc. consistent. For most of my projects, I'm really only interested in building things fully standalone (i.e. never as a portable/shared framework app). Is there an easy way that I can set up my projects with the new tooling to accomplish this? Ideally, whenever I built an executable project, all of my runtime dependencies from nuget would be copied next to my project output. Essentially, I'm looking for something similar to how the regular MSBuild targets handle <CopyNuGetImplementations>true</CopyNuGetImplementations>.

[dsplaisted]

I think you just need to set the RuntimeIdentifier property.

[mellinoe]

Setting RuntimeIdentifier doesn't seem to do what I want. First, it fails to build all of my ProjectReference's, I guess because they don't have any RuntimeIdentifier items defined (because they're libraries).

If I do it on a project created from the template (dotnet new), it still just builds a portable app. The only difference is the deps.json is much larger when I specify RuntimeIdentifier.

[dsplaisted]

I experimented a bit and this is what worked for me for a basic console app:

dotnet restore /p:RuntimeIdentifier=win7-x86
dotnet publish -r win7-x86

I'm not sure about why it wouldn't be building project references for you.

[mellinoe]

The ProjectReference issue seems to be reproducible by just creating a console app and a class library (via dotnet new) and then referencing the library from the app. The class library fails to compile; it's not able to resolve any references.

I'm aware that the Publish target does roughly what I'm after. I was wondering how I could configure my project in such a way that "publishing standalone" was the default behavior, since that's how my projects currently behave. I think doing something like this gets me close:

<Project ToolsVersion="15.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" DefaultTargets="Build;Publish">
  <PropertyGroup><RuntimeIdentifier Condition="'$(RuntimeIdentifier)' == ''">win7-x64</RuntimeIdentifier></PropertyGroup>
...

[dsplaisted]

Turns out we have documentation for this (thanks to @nguerrera for pointing it out on #450).

I think you may need to set the RuntimeIdentifiers property for NuGet and the RuntimeIdentifier property for the Publish target.

[natemcmaster]

Just ran into this as well. Is there anyway that users can write this kind of logic in their project?

<PropertyGroup>
    <RuntimeIdentifier>$(CurrentRid)</RuntimeIdentifer>
</PropertyGroup>

This way 'dotnet publish' always publishes as standalone for the current platform, without having to add '-r $rid'.

[mellinoe]

Yes, +1 to @natemcmaster 's question. Can we have an MSBuild property exposed for that? I know we would find something like that very useful in corefx, as well.