How to build an MSDeploy package for an ASP.Net 5 app that targets .Net Core

Question

I'm trying to configure Visual Studio Online to continuously deploy my ASPNET 5 application to an Azure webapp as described in this tutorial from the Team Foundation Build docs: https://msdn.microsoft.com/Library/vs/alm/Build/azure/deploy-aspnet5

I have followed all the steps and everything is working great. By default this script deploys a build of my app that targets the full .Net 4.5.1 DNX so I decided to try and modify it to deploy for .Net Core.

The build script creates its deployment package by calling: msbuild.exe /t:Build,FileSystemPublishAfter turning up log verbosity and reading through the relevant msbuild files I have learned the following:

The "Build" target ultimately uses dnx.exe to compile the project. Because the project.json file includes both dnx451 and coreclr TFMs this step produces build output for both frameworks - so far so good.

However, the FileSystemPublish target seems to only output an msdeploy package that targets the .Net 4.5.1 runtime. From the logs I could see executing the FileSystemPublish target ultimately issues a "dnu publish" command and in my cases passes "dnx-clr-win-x86.1.0.0-beta6" as the -runtime parameter. When I followed the breadcrumbs to find out where it was getting the value "dnx-clr-win-x86.1.0.0-beta6" from I eventually ended up in the "GetRuntimeToolingPath" task in Microsoft.DNX.Tasks.dll. This task seems to look in global.json to determine the correct runtime to use but strangely appears to internally override this value with "x86" and "clr" before creating the return string.

If I have interpreted things correctly, it seems that the FileSystemPublish target (in Microsoft.DNX.Publishing.targets) is essentially (indirectly) hard wired to use the x86, full .Net framework DNX when it produces its package output. At this point I am stuck for how to get this build process to produce a .Net Core package.

My question is why would FileSystemPublish be coupled to the x86 full .Net DNX and given this appears to be the case (unless I am mistaken) what is the recommended way to produce an msdeploy package for an ASPNET 5 app that targets .Net core?

EDIT: For now I have a workaround. I can pass /p:RuntimeToolingDirectory="C:\Users\buildguest\.dnx\runtimes\dnx-coreclr-win-x64.1.0.0-beta6" as a parameter to msbuild. This overrides the default logic in the GetRuntimeToolPath and forces it to use .Net Core. This works but feels like a hack so I'm leaving the question open for a better answer.

Answer 1

In order to publish Core CLR, just can pass on the msbuild parameter 'PublishDNXVersion' as dnx-coreclr-win-x64.1.0.0-beta6, as shown below:

msbuild <project>.xproj /p:deployOnBuild=true;PublishDNXVersion=dnx-coreclr-win-x64.1.0.0-beta6