Trimming options

The MSBuild properties and items described in this article influence the behavior of trimmed, self-contained deployments. Some of the options mention ILLink, which is the name of the underlying tool that implements trimming. For more information about the underlying tool, see the Trimmer documentation.

Trimming with PublishTrimmed was introduced in .NET Core 3.0. The other options are available in .NET 5 and later versions.

Enable trimming

• <PublishTrimmed>true</PublishTrimmed>

  Enable trimming during publish. This setting also turns off trim-incompatible features and enables trim analysis during build. In .NET 8 and later apps, this setting also enables the configuration binding and request delegate source generators.

Note

If you specify trimming as enabled from the command line, your debugging experience will differ and you might encounter additional bugs in the final product.

Place this setting in the project file to ensure that the setting applies during dotnet build, not just dotnet publish.

This setting enables trimming and trims all assemblies by default. In .NET 6, only assemblies that opted-in to trimming via [AssemblyMetadata("IsTrimmable", "True")] (added in projects that set <IsTrimmable>true</IsTrimmable>) were trimmed by default. You can return to the previous behavior by using <TrimMode>partial</TrimMode>.

This setting trims any assemblies that have been configured for trimming. With Microsoft.NET.Sdk in .NET 6, this includes any assemblies with [AssemblyMetadata("IsTrimmable", "True")], which is the case for the .NET runtime assemblies. In .NET 5, assemblies from the netcoreapp runtime pack are configured for trimming via <IsTrimmable> MSBuild metadata. Other SDKs might define different defaults.

This setting also enables the trim-compatibility Roslyn analyzer and disables features that are incompatible with trimming.

Trimming granularity

Use the TrimMode property to set the trimming granularity to either partial or full. The default setting for console apps (and, starting in .NET 8, Web SDK apps) is full:

<TrimMode>full</TrimMode>

To only trim assemblies that have opted-in to trimming, set the property to partial:

<TrimMode>partial</TrimMode>

If you change the trim mode to partial, you can opt-in individual assemblies to trimming by using a <TrimmableAssembly> MSBuild item.

<ItemGroup>
  <TrimmableAssembly Include="MyAssembly" />
</ItemGroup>

This is equivalent to setting [AssemblyMetadata("IsTrimmable", "True")] when building the assembly.

The following granularity settings control how aggressively unused IL is discarded. This can be set as a property affecting all trimmer input assemblies, or as metadata on an individual assembly, which overrides the property setting.

• <TrimMode>link</TrimMode>

  Enable member-level trimming, which removes unused members from types. This is the default in .NET 6+.

• <TrimMode>copyused</TrimMode>

  Enable assembly-level trimming, which keeps an entire assembly if any part of it is used (in a statically understood way).

Assemblies with <IsTrimmable>true</IsTrimmable> metadata but no explicit TrimMode will use the global TrimMode. The default TrimMode for Microsoft.NET.Sdk is link in .NET 6+, and copyused in previous versions.

Trim additional assemblies

In .NET 6+, PublishTrimmed trims assemblies with the following assembly-level attribute:

[AssemblyMetadata("IsTrimmable", "True")]

The framework libraries have this attribute. In .NET 6+, you can also opt in to trimming for a library without this attribute, specifying the assembly by name (without the .dll extension).

Trimming settings for individual assemblies

When publishing a trimmed app, the SDK computes an ItemGroup called ManagedAssemblyToLink that represents the set of files to be processed for trimming. ManagedAssemblyToLink might have metadata that controls the trimming behavior per assembly. To set this metadata, create a target that runs before the built-in PrepareForILLink target. The following example shows how to enable trimming of MyAssembly.

<Target Name="ConfigureTrimming"
        BeforeTargets="PrepareForILLink">
  <ItemGroup>
    <ManagedAssemblyToLink Condition="'%(Filename)' == 'MyAssembly'">
      <IsTrimmable>true</IsTrimmable>
    </ManagedAssemblyToLink>
  </ItemGroup>
</Target>

You can also use this target to override the trimming behavior specified by the library author, by setting <IsTrimmable>false</IsTrimmable> for an assembly with [AssemblyMetadata("IsTrimmable", "True"]).

Do not add or remove items from ManagedAssemblyToLink, because the SDK computes this set during publish and expects it not to change. The supported metadata is:

• <IsTrimmable>true</IsTrimmable>

  Control whether the given assembly is trimmed.

• <TrimMode>copyused</TrimMode> or <TrimMode>link</TrimMode>

  Control the trimming granularity of this assembly. This metadata takes precedence over the global TrimMode. Setting TrimMode on an assembly implies <IsTrimmable>true</IsTrimmable>.

• <TrimmerSingleWarn>True</TrimmerSingleWarn>

  Control whether to show single warnings for this assembly.

Root assemblies

If an assembly is not trimmed, it's considered "rooted", which means that it and all of its statically understood dependencies will be kept. Additional assemblies can be "rooted" by name (without the .dll extension):

<ItemGroup>
  <TrimmerRootAssembly Include="MyAssembly" />
</ItemGroup>

Root descriptors

Another way to specify roots for analysis is using an XML file that uses the trimmer descriptor format. This lets you root specific members instead of a whole assembly.

<ItemGroup>
  <TrimmerRootDescriptor Include="MyRoots.xml" />
</ItemGroup>

For example, MyRoots.xml might root a specific method that's dynamically accessed by the application:

<linker>
  <assembly fullname="MyAssembly">
    <type fullname="MyAssembly.MyClass">
      <method name="DynamicallyAccessedMethod" />
    </type>
  </assembly>
</linker>

Analysis warnings

• <SuppressTrimAnalysisWarnings>false</SuppressTrimAnalysisWarnings>

  Enable trim analysis warnings.

Trimming removes IL that's not statically reachable. Apps that use reflection or other patterns that create dynamic dependencies might be broken by trimming. To warn about such patterns, set <SuppressTrimAnalysisWarnings> to false. This setting will surface warnings about the entire app, including your own code, library code, and framework code.

Roslyn analyzer

Setting PublishTrimmed in .NET 6+ also enables a Roslyn analyzer that shows a limited set of analysis warnings. You can also enable or disable the analyzer independently of PublishTrimmed.

• <EnableTrimAnalyzer>true</EnableTrimAnalyzer>

  Enable a Roslyn analyzer for a subset of trim analysis warnings.

Suppress warnings

You can suppress individual warning codes using the usual MSBuild properties respected by the toolchain, including NoWarn, WarningsAsErrors, WarningsNotAsErrors, and TreatWarningsAsErrors. There's an additional option that controls the ILLink warn-as-error behavior independently:

• <ILLinkTreatWarningsAsErrors>false</ILLinkTreatWarningsAsErrors>

  Don't treat ILLink warnings as errors. This might be useful to avoid turning trim analysis warnings into errors when treating compiler warnings as errors globally.

Show detailed warnings

In .NET 6+, trim analysis produces at most one warning for each assembly that comes from a PackageReference, indicating that the assembly's internals are not compatible with trimming. You can also show individual warnings for all assemblies:

• <TrimmerSingleWarn>false</TrimmerSingleWarn>

  Show all detailed warnings, instead of collapsing them to a single warning per assembly.

Remove symbols

Symbols are usually trimmed to match the trimmed assemblies. You can also remove all symbols:

• <TrimmerRemoveSymbols>true</TrimmerRemoveSymbols>

  Remove symbols from the trimmed application, including embedded PDBs and separate PDB files. This applies to both the application code and any dependencies that come with symbols.

The SDK also makes it possible to disable debugger support using the property DebuggerSupport. When debugger support is disabled, trimming removes symbols automatically (TrimmerRemoveSymbols will default to true).

Trim framework library features

Several feature areas of the framework libraries come with trimmer directives that make it possible to remove the code for disabled features.

MSBuild property	Description
AutoreleasePoolSupport	When set to false, removes code that creates autorelease pools on supported platforms. false is the default for the .NET SDK.
DebuggerSupport	When set to false, removes code that enables better debugging experiences. This setting also removes symbols.
EnableUnsafeBinaryFormatterSerialization	When set to false, removes BinaryFormatter serialization support. For more information, see BinaryFormatter serialization methods are obsolete and In-box BinaryFormatter implementation removed and always throws.
EnableUnsafeUTF7Encoding	When set to false, removes insecure UTF-7 encoding code. For more information, see UTF-7 code paths are obsolete.
EventSourceSupport	When set to false, removes EventSource-related code and logic.
HttpActivityPropagationSupport	When set to false, removes code related to diagnostics support for System.Net.Http.
InvariantGlobalization	When set to true, removes globalization-specific code and data. For more information, see Invariant mode.
MetadataUpdaterSupport	When set to false, removes metadata update–specific logic related to hot reload.
MetricsSupport	When set to false, removes support for System.Diagnostics.Metrics instrumentation.
StackTraceSupport (.NET 8+)	When set to false, removes support for generating stack traces (for example, Environment.StackTrace or Exception.ToString) by the runtime. The amount of information that is removed from stack trace strings might depend on other deployment options. This option does not affect stack traces generated by debuggers.
UseNativeHttpHandler	When set to true, uses the default platform implementation of HttpMessageHandler for Android and iOS and removes the managed implementation.
UseSystemResourceKeys	When set to true, strips exception messages for System.* assemblies. When an exception is thrown from a System.* assembly, the message is a simplified resource ID instead of the full message.
XmlResolverIsNetworkingEnabledByDefault (.NET 8+)	When set to false, removes support for resolving non-file URLs in System.Xml. Only file-system resolving is supported.

These properties cause the related code to be trimmed and also disable features via the runtimeconfig file. For more information about these properties, including the corresponding runtimeconfig options, see feature switches. Some SDKs might have default values for these properties.

Framework features disabled when trimming

The following features are incompatible with trimming because they require code that's not statically referenced. These features are disabled by default in trimmed apps.

Warning

Enable these features at your own risk. They are likely to break trimmed apps without extra work to preserve the dynamically referenced code.

• <BuiltInComInteropSupport>

  Built-in COM support is disabled.

• <CustomResourceTypesSupport>

  Use of custom resource types isn't supported. ResourceManager code paths that use reflection for custom resource types are trimmed.

• <EnableCppCLIHostActivation>

  C++/CLI host activation is disabled.

• <EnableUnsafeBinaryFormatterInDesigntimeLicenseContextSerialization>

  DesigntimeLicenseContextSerializer use of BinaryFormatter serialization is disabled.

• <StartupHookSupport>

  Running code before Main with DOTNET_STARTUP_HOOKS isn't supported. For more information, see host startup hook.