.NETCore apps cannot specify a Windows application manifest and other things that must go in exe

dotnet.exe does not contain an application manifest, nor does the stripped down version when building a standalone app. The result is that applications cannot specify supportedOS to tell Windows they want to run without any OS version compat shims.

On desktop the way this works is that an application can add a manifest file to the app project (Add new item > Application manifest file) and that gets embedded in the exe by the compiler. Since .NETCore apps don’t actually build the EXE we’d have to do something different.

I propose we change the host to include all the latest supportedOS entries at the time we ship. This is consistent with what we do for exe’s in desktop. We could then allow the application to specify a manifest then the SDK could replace the one in the host when building a standalone app.

[nguerrera]

I think we should track whether you get an apphost by default separately from the work to put more stuff in an apphost.

[ericstj]

This needs to be done for .NETCore 3.0. There are a lot of things that should be transferred from the app to the host in the case of a standalone app in order to meet people’s expectations. Here’s a partial list:

1. Sub system bit (EG: windows vs console).
2. Windows manifest
3. Version
4. Icon

1 & 2 will directly impact the desired functionality of .NET Core 3.0. There may be more. /cc @JeremyKuhne