There are two ways to publish and deploy a .NET Core application:
- Framework-dependent
- Self-contained
If you choose to deploy your application and its dependencies, but not .NET Core itself, then you rely on .NET Core already being on the target computer. This works well for web applications deployed to a server because .NET Core and lots of other web applications are likely already on the server.
Sometimes, you want to be able to give someone a USB stick containing your application and know that it can execute on their computer. You want to perform a self-contained deployment. The size of the deployment files will be larger, but you will know that it will work.