I'm using the Remotesoft linker and mini-deployment tool as part of my build process. One of its features is to remove the need to have the .net framework installed on a client machine to run a .net application. Part of how it does this is by bundling the native file components required by the application with a natively compiled version of the executable saved by visual studio.
The problem is that visual studio's dependency analyzer looks at the dlls from the framework and sees that they need the framework installed and adds it to the detected dependencies list. Because of how the mini deployment tool works any dependencies will be provided from the app folder not the normal framework location so in actuality it's not needed.
I can't find a way to override this though and keep the resulting setup.exe file from checking for and attempting to download the framework before allowing the install to proceed. Because the computers my app is intended to be deployed on won't have a network connection to do the download (one of the reasons we're using the Remotesoft tools) this behavior needs to be stopped.
I've tried editing the .vbproj file to delete the dependency but VS promptly adds it back as soon as it opens it.
Edit: I tried removing the setup.exe bootstrapper, but the dependency check is still baked into the MSI.