Global tool for discovering an app's platform dependencies

[mthalman]

Summary

A .NET project is where the dependencies become calculable. By running a tool against a project, and using the collected platform dependency data, it is possible to definitively output the list of platform dependencies that project requires. This greatly reduces the friction required to gather this information when compared to either the trial-and-error method of running the app and seeing whether it breaks or manually looking up .NET components to determine their platform dependencies.

Note: This is a proposed experience for .NET 6 and not yet committed.

Goal

Developers can discover their application's platform dependencies in a deterministic fashion by running a dotnet global tool.

[richlander]

A simpler, and possibly more valuable experience would be:

• Document the set of native dependencies for each binary that is part of the .NET platform, in both markdown and markup (JSON, XML, ...) form.
• Produce and publish a tool that generates the dependencies (only .NET ones) for a give project or solution.

Enable users to do the join.

[mthalman]

• Document the set of native dependencies for each binary that is part of the .NET platform, in both markdown and markup (JSON, XML, ...) form.

That is what #5646 is about.

• Produce and publish a tool that generates the dependencies (only .NET ones) for a give project or solution.

This is basically what is contained in the project.assets.json file from a project's build output, correct? Do we even need anything beyond that?