Remove unnecessary files from release directory
<p>I use NSIS to create an installer for my project. Wishing to have as small a filesize as I can, I began looking into my project's dlls, included files and prerequesites and noticed the following are all different:</p>

<ul>
<li>the minimal files required to run, as determined by educated guess + trial and error. I made sure the application works properly with this minmal set of files.</li>
<li>the files exported by the "Publish" fonction for click once deployment (excluding click once specific files)</li>
<li>the files in the release directory (excluding the pdb and vshost files)</li>
</ul>

<p>It seems VS2015 generates an xml file for every dll. Some dlls I don't use and don't reference are copied as well.
My question is why is there so many unnecessary files and how can I configure VS2015 to not have them in /release?</p>