Publishing with Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.UI and Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer 8.0.2+ adds webview2Loader.dll and msalruntime.dll resulting in app not starting

[HugCoder]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Describe the bug

After updating Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer and possibly in combination with Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.UI (and possibly Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.EntityFrameworkCore) to 8.0.2 (8.0.3 or 8.0.4), publishing (release mode) to folder suddenly results in adding the (old) DLLs:
msalruntime.dll (2023-05-09)
WebView2Loader.dll (2021-05-25)

and I'm not sure if it's these in particular that cause problem, but in the Windows .NET 8 server environment (using Plesk for .NET support), the application won't start anymore, with only error "HTTP Error 500.31 - Failed to load ASP.NET Core runtime". Trace log only talks about AspNetCoreModuleV2 with fatal error, no details beyond that. The target framework is net8.0-windows.

Expected Behavior

I expected the application to start, and not these old DLLs :)

Steps To Reproduce

I think it's the combination of these:

<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.EntityFrameworkCore" Version="8.0.2" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.UI" Version="8.0.2" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer" Version="8.0.2" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools" Version="8.0.2">

but I assume it depends on where you publish as well, but in any case I don't understand why the old DLLs are suddenly there to begin with and what they are used for.

Exceptions (if any)

HTTP Error 500.31 - Failed to load ASP.NET Core runtime

.NET Version

8

Anything else?

Perhaps it's Plesk missing something in their support for some newer minor version of .NET 8?
Plesk version used seems to be 18.0.60 though, which supposedly adds support for 8.0.3.
The server host provider has confirmed that both 8.0.2 and 8.0.3 runtimes are installed.

[SteveSandersonMS]

@ajcvickers We're transferring this because as far as we understand, this issue occurs only because of EF's downstream dependencies and isn't something ASP.NET Core can control. Let us know that doesn't seem right. Thanks!

[AndriySvyryd]

This is caused by Microsoft.Data.SqlClient, please file an issue on https://github.com/dotnet/SqlClient