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Publish a console app as a single executable

I created a small console application that automatically adds the application pool users on your local IIS server to the correct groups on the web server so that performance counter data is correctly send to Application Insights.

You can find some extra content, the original announcement and the source code here:

So what is the reason for this post?

When you publish the tool, it resulted in a combination of an exe and multiple DLL’s:


This means that you need to copy all these files to be able to run the tool. It would be nice if there was only a single executable.

Let’s see how to get this done…

Switch to single file publish

Open up the csproj file and add the following line:

The resulting csproj file looks like this:

If we now try to publish our application again through dotnet publish we only have a single executable:

Remark: Notice that we also have a runtime identifier set. If you don’t set this, you need to specify this when calling the dotnet publish command, e.g. dotnet publish -r win-x64

We can also get rid of the separate pdb file by changing the debugtype to embedded in the csproj:


More information

Create a single file for application deployment - .NET | Microsoft Learn

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