Writing my first vb.net VS2022 application involved a lot of experimentation while learning, adding then (only in a few cases) removing packages to the project. In the end, the \bin\debug folder contains a huge number of dlls which I'm sure I don't need. I was surprised to see the same files are also in the \Release folder. For example at one time I tried implementing "user-secrets" but then gave up after learning it doesn't do what I thought, by now I can't even remember where I typed in the user secret stuff, or if I deleted them, But there is a "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.UserSecrets.dll" in the \release folder, which I assumed is more minimal collection, and files such as .pdb are not needed if there is no debugging.
I see that the .vbproj file has a lot of <PackageReference Include=... lines which correspond to the many packages.Using "Remove unused references" reduced the number of these lines but the number of dlls and other stuff such as .pdb & .json files in the \release folder did not change.
There have been a lot of questions about this and a number of tools are mentioned in the answers. Alas, all of the threads are old and refer to VS 2010 or at best 2013.
Is there a up-to-date method or tool that can help with this clean up?
Else I will have to remove the dlls one at at time and test all the programs features to see what happens. Or perhaps deleting the <PackageReference Include=... lines one by one will remove the unnecessary dlls? Either way testing all the features of the program will take for ever, so the right tool will be best.