Should the samples/templates only import required packages?

[Sébastien Ros (sebastienros)]

I noticed that the samples and templates include Microsoft.WindowsAppSDK when most of the time they only require Microsof.WindowsAppSDK.WinUI or Microsof.WindowsAppSDK.Runtime. The meta package brings in AI/ML assemblies that are usually not necessary and can increase the build size, even for trimmed releases. And I believe that even for trimmed release it will increase the build times because the linked will have to add it to the problem.

We discovered it while checking the size of our nativeaot-ed binaries, and then noticed this in other applications using WinUI.

[Alexandre Zollinger Chohfi (azchohfi)]

Hello. We did work on this area recently.
Reactor does not have a dependency, anymore, on the meta-package, but only on the WinUI package (#822). Just last week we also added the runtime to avoid self-contained by default (#1283).

Still, you are correct that the new WinAppSDK templates point to main package... I'm pretty sure we can remove that dependency. I'll look into it!