Analyzing projects having multi target framework

[RishadOR]

My project use roslyn to analyze source code and build call graph.

Solution solution = await workspace.OpenSolutionAsync(solutionPath, new ProjectLoadProgress());

There are many projects that targets multiple frameworks.

<TargetFrameworks>net6.0;net7.0;net8.0;net9.0</TargetFrameworks>

As far as i know, roslyn loads the project for each TFM

Found project in solution: DemoApp(net6.0)
Found project in solution: DemoApp(net7.0)
Found project in solution: DemoApp(net8.0)
Found project in solution: DemoApp(net9.0)

Questions:

1. Do i need all the sdk versions installed? Installing all the sdk inside docker image will make the size bigger, is there any better solution?
2. When the target frameworks contains .net framework like

<TargetFrameworks>net461;netstandard2.0;net8.0</TargetFrameworks>

How to handle this in linux machine?
3. In some opensource projects, there are 600+ projects in a solution. Loading all the projects may consume lot of memory. Is there any better approach?

[jasonmalinowski]

Do i need all the sdk versions installed?

For a project that is multitargeting, there's only one SDK version involved (namely the version that's in the global.json if it exists.) So in your example, just a 9.0 SDK will target all of those versions.

For the net461 question, ot sure if that works that still works, at least for the base TFM since we'll still have reference assemblies for it. We do also have mono support for loading projects that aren't SDK-style for the non-Windows case. Would have to try it and see.

Is there any better approach?

You can load individual projects, but how you'd pick the subset is up to you.