How can I exclude transitive dependencies that are not needed in the project when publishing my application?

Schmidlin Tizian 0

Hi there,

I'm building my first real c#.net app using Windows Forms and I used ChatGPT a lot for this as I'm only using Visual Studio Code and have no good way to kickstart my project in any other way. This all worked fine and I came to a point where I wanted to publish my program when I was hit by the brick wall that are the 200MB of generated code I'd have to deploy for this relatively simple app.

So I dug into it a bit and was able to save some 25MB by restraining the language packages to English and German (yay!) using <SatelliteResourceLanguages>en;de</SatelliteResourceLanguages>, which is a step in the right direction but still way too big IMHO.

I've tried to figure out which of my packages uses up so much space and came across the dependencies included in Microsoft.Powershell.SDK, which also include Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp, which is used in the Powershell SDK tests. So far so good. But coming from a PHP background, where you can define so called dev-dependencies, I was a wondering if there was a way to remove such dependencies.

.Net supports trimming, which is great for CLI apps, because it seems to simply work, but as of today, there does not seem to be a way to do this when using Windows Forms (this is reported when building and referring to this page).

My question therefore being: is there a way, without using trimming, to remove transitive dependencies from third party packages and the Microsoft.NET.Sdk base package?

Thanks for your feedback!

Jiale Xue - MSFT 34,201 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2023-06-06T03:05:54.2233333+00:00

Hi @Schmidlin Tizian , Welcome to Microsoft Q&A. This forum does not support Visual Studio Code related questions. Regarding the release of reduced dependency packages, Microsoft currently seems to only have the self-contained method, if you do not use This method, there is no good advice.
Schmidlin Tizian 0 Reputation points

2023-06-06T06:19:39.06+00:00

Hi @Jiale Xue - MSFT ,

thanks for your feedback. I am able to make a self-contained exe, but it takes up 160MB for an app that took me less than 200 lines of code and 2000 lines in the designer and all things considered, the DLL + Exe in non-selfcontained mode take up 200Kb, which seems ok, but the whole solution is just too big IMHO.

Also, while the application is running, I was able to remove the DLL that were not needed and was also able to reduce the size to 90MB, which is not what I'd hoped for, but still better than nothing.

But I understand, that if there is no technical way of doing this, I'll have to keep it that way or move the application to the web.

Thanks for your support!

Best Regards

Tizian
Jiale Xue - MSFT 34,201 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2023-06-06T08:08:02.78+00:00

It is also possible that the memory occupied by the resource file is relatively large. If there is a network, you can try to put resources in the cloud.
Schmidlin Tizian 0 Reputation points

2023-06-06T10:44:38.4833333+00:00

No no, the memory is not an issue, the app uses 38MB of memory, which still is quite a bit, but definitely not a problem in production.

Thanks anyway!