Where is project.json in Default .NET Core Application Templates in Visual Studio 2017

As you might already know the Release Candidate of the next version of Visual Studio is released and that is Visual Studio 2017 (It was known as Visual Studio 15 until it was officially named as Visual Studio 2017). If you still couldn’t check it out, download and give it a try.

After downloading and installing, and if you create any .NET Core application (for instance an ASP.NET Core Web Application), you might see that project.json is missing.

No project.json

project.json used to be the key file in a .NET Core project, as it was where all the project dependencies, compilation information (targeted .NET Core versions etc.) etc. were maintained.

So now you might be wondering, if we don’t have the project.json, where are all those information defined and maintained. And those are moved back to .csproj file of the project. This change was announced couple of months back (May, 2016 to be specific).

And one important thing, in previous versions of Visual Studio, you need to unload the project first to edit it’s .csproj file. With Visual Studio 2017, you don’t have to do that, just right click on the project and click on Edit {ProjectName}.csproj.

Edit {ProjectName}.csproj

And when the file is opened, you can find all the information you are looking for.

Happy Coding.

Regards,

Jaliya