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Packaging a .NET Core 3.0 application with MSIX

Matteo Pagani's avatar
Matteo Pagani
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Mar 25, 2019
We have talked multiple times on this blog about MSIX and how you can use it to package existing Win32 applications, so that you can improve the deployment and distribution of your Windows applicatio...
Updated Mar 28, 2019
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Matteo Pagani's avatar
Matteo Pagani
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Aug 26, 2020

Hello soumyamahunt , regarding this specific problem I would open an issue on the App Center repository on GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/appcenter Based on my investigations, I don't this problem is related to MSIX packaging, since I can see that also the standard bin of the .NET 5 application includes all the runtimes, despite I compiled it for x86 only. My feeling is that this is the way the NuGet package provided by the App Center team behaves.


As a workaround to redurce the size of deployment, you would need to do so manual work (that can be automated with a script) to:

 

1) Unpack the package generated by Visual Studio

2) Remove the runtimes you don't need

3) Recreate the package

4) Sign the package

 

You can do this by leveraging makeappx and signtool (which are part of the Windows 10 SDK https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/package/create-app-package-with-makeappx-tool and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/package/sign-app-package-using-signtool), or with a 3rd party tool like MSIX Hero (https://msixhero.net/) if you prefer a GUI based experience.