Is Windows Application Packaging Project dead?

[jbennink]

No commits since 2019. If I create an new winforms project and a Windows Application Packaging project and target win-x64 I get an error:

Assets file 'C:\data\....\projectname\obj\wappublish\win-x64\project.assets.json' not found. Run a NuGet package restore to generate this file.

Searching for this finds some problem with WinUI3 in VS2019 that was about win10-x64 => win-x64 But my project only generates a win-x86 folder.

Not sure whether the samples repo is the correct on but it's not easy to find information about appinstaller in general and specifically the Windows Application Packaging Project in VS

[sbanni]

@jbennink Have you tried to restore the project/solution? Could you elaborate on the steps you took to get the error?

1. Create a new winforms project (Is this targetting .NETFramework or .netcore?)
2. Create the Windows Application Packaging Project
3. In the packaging project add a reference to the winforms project
4. Change solution configuration to x64? (Need to add x64 configuration to winforms project)
5. Publish packaging project
6. Select x64 and create

[jenny923432]

I'm experiencing the same issue, and in about 5 hours of googling for solutions, all I've found is dozens of people with the same issue like this one, and no solutions anywhere. I experience it when performing exactly the steps @jbennink describes, when targeting .NET Framework or .NET Core of any version. Restoring doesn't help, eliminating all sources of NuGet packages doesn't help. Cloning packaging sample repos has the same problem. Happens on all five Windows machines I've tried. Tried on some .NET Discords, looked up YouTube channels about the project, and they're all full of nothing but comments about this same problem. There are about a dozen threads on the community forums about this same issue and none of them have any responses or solutions.

I have to conclude that it's broken and has been for years.