What is the purpose of msbuild's GenerateRuntimeConfigurationFiles?

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I upgraded a netcore1.1 project to the new VS2017/csproj.

In my test projects only, it added:

<PropertyGroup>
  <GenerateRuntimeConfigurationFiles>true</GenerateRuntimeConfigurationFiles>
</PropertyGroup>

I did some digging to discover that it generates these files in the bin directory:

  • ProjectName.Tests.runtimeconfig.json
  • ProjectName.Tests.runtimeconfig.dev.json

What is this setting and these files, and why do I need them?

Why were they only generated for my test projects?

1 Answers
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