Managing dotnet installations

The dotnet --list-sdks command invokes native code from the host component. We can confirm by setting COREHOST_TRACE=1 when running the command and investigating some of the traces.

An interesting side effect of this is that providing the --list-sdk option directly to the dotnet.dll is not handled because the host component is expected to handle before the execution reaches managed code.

That is, these two commands will have different outcomes:

• dotnet --list-sdks
• dotnet /Users/augustfengd/.dotnet/sdk/9.0.100/dotnet.dll --list-sdks

The dotnet --list-runtimes is works similar to dotnet --list-sdks but it will print the sdks instead.

The dotnet sdk check command invokes managed code, but the managed code eventually calls native code in the host component to print the information.

At the time of writing, this involves loading the fxr library, and calling its hostfxr_get_dotnet_environment_info function.

The dotnet --version command invokes managed code and prints the runtime's version using reflection.

The dotnet --info command relies on both managed code and native code to produce the information.

The first half of the information is printed by the managed code, and the second half is printed by the host component.