Writing the first vb.net VS2022 application involved a lot of experimentation and adding then (only in a few cases) removing packages to the project. In the end the binrelease folder contains a huge number of dlls which I’m sure I don’t need. 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!

I see that the .vbproj file has a lot of 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 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.