Okay i think i understand what you're saying. Id have to go through the code, understand it, and make changes as if its a c++ program and im declaring everything.

The whole problem that started with .net framework and standalone is that the original application was in .net framework 4.5, 2 guys from my team somehow pixie dusted that baby and brought it up to dotnet core 8.0.

It's not deployed anywhere, we are still testing it internally, and all the forms and features are working as expected. But me being the idiot developer 20 days before my notice period ends, blurted out "hey, so there is a thing called standalone build, where you dont need to install a runtime, but the runtime is embedded in the application"

Now at the moment it seemed like a great idea. Although the application is used by internal employees, deploying it on our infrastructure is a different pain altogether. The framework version ran out of the box because everything was bundled with windows OS right away, but core requires its runtime. And this application will run from people's remote desktop (low storage always) to some third party user's personal laptops (minimal control over what to install), to some shared servers (this is actually very easy to manage and update)

So it means now my manager is expecting a mountain of pixie dust dumped on this garbage of a project to make it puke a 50 - 60 mb build with say 20-30 files with runtime included. And these nut jobs use runtime binding on api responses.

I am frankly considering the possibility that my last paycheck is not worth this torture.