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Publishing a ReadyToRun project with --no-restore requires changes to the restore

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If you publish a project with -p:PublishReadyToRun=true in addition to --no-restore, the project will only build with packages that were restored in a prior dotnet restore operation. In .NET 5, this process worked and resulted in a crossgen'd binary. In .NET 6, this same process will fail with the NETSDK1094 error.

Version introduced

.NET 6

Previous behavior

In previous versions, the crossgen application was packaged with the runtime. As a result, the crossgen process was able to run on your application regardless of if the project had been restored or not. It was a common practice to separate dotnet restore from dotnet publish, adding --no-restore to the publish command to ensure that no additional network accesses occurred.

New behavior

In .NET 6, dotnet restore followed by dotnet publish -p:PublishReadyToRun=true --no-restore will fail with the NETSDK1094 error. This is because the crossgen binary is now shipped as a separate NuGet package, and so needs to be part of the restore operation for publishing to succeed.

Reason for change

The crossgen binary is not required for many workloads, so it was split out from the main SDK. It is typically acquired on-demand, and the publishing MSBuild targets now handle this acquisition by adding the package to the list of packages to be restored.

  • If you want to maintain an isolated publish experience, tell the restore step that you'll be publishing ReadyToRun. Add -p:PublishReadyToRun=true to your restore command line as well.
  • Or, remove --no-restore from your publish command line to allow the publish command to restore crossgen as well.