Targeting Multiple Runtimes When Publishing a .NET Core App

Question

I want to create a self contained web application using .NET Core. I want to target any version of Windows and have this in my project.json:

"runtimes": {
  "win10-x64": { },
  "win8-x64": { },
  "win7-x64": { }
}

When I run dotnet publish --runtime win10-x64 I can only specify a single runtime to publish at a time. I then have to maintain three copies of my binaries.

Is it possible to publish my app for all three runtimes and copy that folder around as a completely self contained application?

Answer 1

When you create a self-contained application, it contains all dependencies it needs to run. As far as I can tell, the only different between publishing to the various versions of Windows is that for older versions, some dependencies that are built-in in the newer versions have to be bundled in.

This means that if you want to have one version of your self-contained application that runs on all supported versions of Windows, you can: just use the oldest version of Windows (win7-x64).

The same approach probably won't work on Linux, since Linux generally does not maintain binary compatibility between versions.