The team at Microsoft has announced an extension in Visual Studio that allows users to upgrade their .NET Framework or .NET Core web and desktop applications directly within Visual Studio.
According to the blog post, if a user’s application is built for .NET Framework or .NET Core, now is the time to upgrade to .NET 6 (Long Term Support version) or .NET 7 (Standard Term Support version) in order to gain performance enhancements as well as access to new features and capabilities.
After the Upgrade Assistant extension is installed, customers are enabled to upgrade every type of .NET application from any initial version by right-clicking on the project in Solution Explorer and choosing “Upgrade.”
The team stated that Upgrade Assistant is intended to take care of the mechanics, however, depending on what framework and project type a user is upgrading from, they should expect to do some manual post-processing to be sure that no breaking changes were missed.
In the latest version, this tool currently supports ASP.NET, Class libraries, Console, WPF, and WinForms. Support for Xamarin to .NET MAUI migration, UWP to WinUI migration, and WCF to WCF Core migration are already in development.
There are three different upgrade types supported by Upgrade Assistant: in-place, side-by-side, and side-be-side incremental.
In-place upgrading only shows the user options that would work well for their specific app, side-by-side upgrades the user’s original project all at once, and side-by-side incremental attaches a copy of the original containing the upgraded code to the solution.
For more information, read the blog post.
