Error Publishing .NET Core App in Azure DevOps YAML Build

short story, i've created a simple yaml build for a .net core project where one of the tasks publishes a simple .net core console application. after running the build i got a strange error in the output:

no web project was found in the repository. web projects are identified by presence of either a web.config file or wwwroot folder in the directory.

this is extremely strange, because the project is not a web project, it is a standard console application written for .net core 2.2, so i do not understand why it is searching a web.config file.

then i decided to create a standard non-yaml build, and when i dropped the task on the build i immediately understood the problem . this happens because .net core task with the publish command is assuming, by default, that a web application is going to be published.

figure 1: default value for the dotnet publish command is to publish a web project.

since i hae no web project to publish i immediately changed  my yaml definition to explicitly set the publishwebprojects property to false.

 - task: dotnetcorecli@2
    displayname: .net core publish
    inputs:
      command: publish
      projects: '$(serviceproject)'
      arguments: '--output $(build.artifactstagingdirectory)'
      configuration: $(buildconfiguration)
      workingdirectory: $(serviceprojectdir)
      publishwebprojects: false
      zipafterpublish: true

and the build was fixed.