dotnet publish of net461 does not copy native assets but netcoreapp2.1 will

I have a managed .nupkg (WixToolset.Core.Native) that depends on a .nupkg with native assets (runtime.win.WixToolset.Core.Native). The native assets are in runtimes\win\native.

I have two other projects that consume the WixToolset.Core.Native.nupkg. One project is netcoreapp2.1 and one is net461. When publishing the netcoreapp2.1 project all of the assets from runtimes\win\native are copied. When publishing the net461 project none of the native assets are copied.

The following will demonstrate the above behavior:

1. Clone https://github.com/wixtoolset/Core.git
2. Run “appveyor.cmd”
3. Note present build\Release\publish\netcoreapp2.1\wixnative.*.exe
4. Note missing build\Release\publish\net461\wixnative.*.exe

@nick_guerrera (Twitter) suggested opening this issue after discussing in this thread: https://twitter.com/nick_guerrera/status/1017903818367881216

[dasMulli]

So I get the repro when fixing the reference to WixToolset.Core.Native back to 4.0.12 (before the RID change in the package) in WixToolset.Core.csproj. When I then added a reference to Microsoft.NETCore.Platforms/2.1.0 the rid-specific assets appeared in the publish output.

[dasMulli]

Quick hypothesis from my mobile: does it change when you also reference Microsoft.NETCore.Platforms? If there is no package pulling that in transitively, there’s no RID graph specifying the win-x*>win relationship