.NET Core 1.0 came out June 27, 2016. 4 years later, and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of person hours development, I figured it would be quite mature.
On that premise, feeling quite hopeful, I decided to see what’s involved in converting a .NET 4.7.1 standalone console application to .NET Core 3.1, which you’d think would be relatively straight forward.
Three hours later, my 5MB standalone console application has ballooned to 74MB! If you select ‘PublishTrimmed=true’, then the size drops to 44MB but then the application doesn’t work. Apparently, trimming is not able to work out what’s needed, even when reflection isn’t involved.
Turns out even the un-trimmed 74MB app. still doesn’t work as you can’t use the built-in encrypted connection strings section in app.config file. (It hasn’t currently been implemented in .NET Core, along with DbProviderFractory, and a few other surprises…)
I went looking for resources and other people’s experiences converting to .NET Core.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/porting/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/analyzers/api-analyzer
https://github.com/hvanbakel/CsprojToVs2017
https://ianqvist.blogspot.com/2018/01/reducing-size-of-self-contained-net.html
Scott Hanselman gets really excited about making a 13MB+ “Hello world” .Net Core application. He even calls it tiny!! (and that’s after he got it down from 69MB). His post starts out with the line “I’ve always been fascinated by making apps as small as possible, especially in the .NET space.” Irony, or what? In what kind of insane world is a “Hello World!” application 13MB!?!
On a tangential side note; just ditched ILMerge for creating standalone executables. In the past I’ve used Jeffrey Richter’s technique of embedding assemblies in the resource manifest, adding a startup hook to load assemblies into the app. domain at runtime, but like a FOOL, I thought that ILMerge was the ‘better’, more .NETway of doing things.
The amount of pain ILMerge has caused me over the last few years is staggering. It has to be one of the most fragile tools out there. If the planets aren’t aligned it spits the dummy. If there’s ever a problem it spits out an unhelpful cryptic “exited with error X” message. Good luck finding the problem!
Just moved over to using Fody/Costura; it uses that same technique of embedding assemblies in the executable.
It worked the very first time! Unlike ILMerge. As an added bonus it automatically compresses/decompresses assemblies, and my .NET 4.7.1 standalone executable is 2 MB smaller!