Developers can confidently generate single file apps that work for the supported target platforms

[samsp-msft]

Single file apps are a journey, we progressed from a self-extract approach in 3.x to a superhost in 5.0, but there is more to be done to complete the story. Single file apps need to work for every .NET workload and app framework where the target platform allows for it (to reduce developer perceived complexity of seeing several output files vs one output file), including:

• Winforms
• WPF
• MAUI
• ASP.NET including MVC, Razor Pages, Server-side Blazor, WebAPI, gRPC etc.

Goals:

• Predictability: Developers should be aware of what will and won't work in a single file experience
  • Ensuring that referenced libraries are also not going to produce issues
• Completeness for specific workloads

Work Items

• Flush out testing for each of the scenarios
• Extend superhost beyond Linux Superhost for Windows & Mac #43071
  • Create superhost for Windows
  • Create superhost for MacOS
• Enable debugging of superhost apps with Visual Studio Support Single File Diagnostics #45382
• Tooling & Experience
  • Add analyzers for common issues that occur with single file apps, such as file path resolution from the assembly
  • Integrate the analyzers into Visual Studio
  • Add attribute to decorate places which are incompatible with single file
  • Some way to enable these analyzers when building apps (Analyzers for publish only functionality sdk#14562) and libraries
• Improve single-file integration with linker Improvements to single-file analysis #44488
• Improve single-file-publishing for ASP.NET Improve single-file-publishing for ASP.NET aspnetcore#27888

[samsp-msft]

@agocke - we need to flush out the list of work items