When I publish a simple console project via VS(2019) the two folders in ..\bin\Release\netcore2.2\ are created (suppose I ship for win-x86):

• publish: the folder I specified for publishing. It is about 60MB and contains the application itself and whole set of std .netcoreapp dlls.

• win-x86: the tiny folder only with the app and some jsons

And the apps work in both folders. They both works as expected.

The question is: why there should be two folders and why the app in the win-x86 doesn't require 60MB of std dll's to run?

Some notes:

• The publish folder is overwritten when I then publish for other platform. But win-x86 remains and app in it runs correctly.

• If I have some nuget packages the app depends on, they are copied to publish but not to win-x86. The executable in win-x86 still works though.