Design/Doc issue: PlatformTarget vs Platforms vs RuntimeIdentifier handled inconsistently

[davidmatson]

I've stumbled across a number of cases where it isn't clear if I should use PlatformTarget, Platforms or RuntimeIdentifier. The tooling seems to get confused a bit between these properties as well - sometimes one UI (project properties) will reflect one property but another UI (Configuration Manager) will reflect a different property.

Could we document when to use which property? Or, perhaps even better, could we reduce the concept count here and would that lead to fewer bugs/ambiguities/possible conflicts?

For example, what's the right way to say the project is x64?

<RuntimeIdentifier>win-x64</RuntimeIdentifier>

and/or

<PlatformTarget>x64</PlatformTarget>

and/or

<Platforms>x64</Platforms>

Is there any way to reduce the number of ways to say "I'm x64"?

[davkean]

This issue was moved to dotnet/sdk#1553