Minimizing References with .NET Core csproj VS 2017 Tooling

Question

I have .NET Core class libraries I publish to NuGet. After upgrading them to VS 2017 csproj format, they have the following signature.

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  ...
</Project>

Adding Microsoft.NET.Sdk seems to add references to a base set of libraries. However, as a library author myself, I probably want to only references a minimum set of references. Is that still true and if so, how can it be achieved?

Looking at the ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core projects, they seem to use Microsoft.NET.Sdk and do not individually select just the packages they need.

Update

I raised issue dotnet/cli #5994 on GitHub and @davidfowl said:

The new guidance is to reference NETStandard.Library always as a package author.

However, he's not gone into detail as to why?

Answer 1

You can set

<PropertyGroup>
    <DisableImplicitFrameworkReferences>true</DisableImplicitFrameworkReferences>
</PropertyGroup>

In your .csproj. This tells the SDK to not reference NETStandard.Library or Microsoft.NETCore.App implicitly.