How to reduce size of winforms executable in .Net6?

Question

I am very new to .Net6 and .Net Core in general. I understand that it is possible to publish a single file executable but I was a bit surprised to see that the executable is over 180MB even though the application is relatively small.

The application is targeted to Windows x64 only and uses Windows Forms. It has a handful of Forms and uses a JSON library and a CLI library.

There are a number of dependencies which were more-or-less added automatically but I don't know if they are all strictly necessary (e.g the ASPNetCore item)

Bearing in mind that I am only targeting Windows and the featureset used is limited, what are the actions I can take to reduce the size of the executable?

Update

I found https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/trimming/trim-self-contained which seems to indicate that 'trimming' of WinForms apps is not (yet) possible.

Answer 1

If you already did not, you may switch deployment mode to Framework-dependent from self-contained in publish profile settings, this will exclude .net runtime and will reduce file size dramatically.

However, excluding .net runtime, diverts from its purpose being single file, as you need to install correct runtime to use application. In my opinion, it is worth to keep single exe file with runtime included.