@wjk

Describe the bug

Microsoft’s extremely cruel but completely predictable response to developers complaining about mandatory AI in Visual Studio here (namely, to ignore all feedback and close the ticket) now means I cannot use Visual Studio at all. As such, I have migrated to JetBrains Rider. However, JetBrains Rider does not support wapproj, since that is part of Visual Studio. My project is listed in the Windows Store, so I must use MSIX somehow.

My only other option (besides rolling my own build process from scratch, a very time-consuming endeavor) is to migrate my project to use the Microsoft.Windows.SDK.BuildTools.MSIX NuGet package. I did this, only to discover that the targets in that package contain a hard-coded path dependency into a Visual Studio installation to locate mspdbcmf.exe! Therefore, I cannot create an MSIX package without Visual Studio installed.

Steps to reproduce the bug

1. Create a project using Microsoft.Windows.SDK.BuildTools.MSIX on a computer that does not have any version of Visual Studio installed.
2. dotnet publish
3. Observe the error.

Expected behavior

It should not error.

Ideally, the MSIX package would include a bundled copy of this tool. Failing that, I should be able to reference the Microsoft.Windows.SDK.BuildTools NuGet package and use mspdbcmf.exe from there, except that mspdbcmf is not included in that package either.

Screenshots

N/A

NuGet package version

Windows App SDK 1.8.4: 1.8.260101001

Packaging type

Packaged (MSIX)

Windows version

Windows 11 version 24H2 (26100, June 2025 Update)

IDE

Other

Additional context

I am actually using version 1.7.251221100, since that is the latest version of this specific package posted to NuGet.