Reduce the toolkit impact on application size

[vgromfeld]

Describe the problem this feature would solve

Trying to know what is the impact of the toolkit on the application final size, I've created two blank applications using Visual Studio. On one of them, I've added a dependency to Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.UI. I've only added the nuget dependency. I'm not using anything from the library.

Here are the sizes of the applications' dll when compiled in release using .Net Native:

	x86	x64
Default blank app	748	919
Using Toolkit	6,171	7,253

Values are in KB. .Net Native directives' files are empty..

This huge impact comes from the fact that the blank app template is super minimal.
On our application, we are seeing a 2MB increase on both x86 and x64. This is still an important impact (knowing that nothing is used).

Is there a way to reduce the impact of the toolkit on the final binary size ?

Sample projects

UwpToolkitBinaryImpact.zip

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[michael-hawker]

Removing the Json.NET dependency should help in the future, that's tracked by this item: #3060, not sure if that'll line up for the 7.0 release though as there's a blocking bug in the System.Text.Json package, which is still another dependent package until .NET 5.

There may be an opportunity to investigate where we're using this dependency and clean that up or isolate it though.

[michael-hawker]

@vgromfeld can you add some more details here about your recent investigations, especially in regards to the XAML Metadata stuff you looked at recently?