Announcing an update for .NET Upgrade Assistant with a new CLI tool!

Olia Gavrysh

June 1st, 20238 6

We are happy to announce that we’ve released a new version of the Upgrade Assistant CLI tool! Now you can port your applications from either Visual Studio or your command line and benefit from all the latest features and improvements of .NET!

The .NET Upgrade Assistant is a tool that helps you upgrade your application to the latest .NET and migrate from older platforms such as Xamarin Forms and UWP to newer offerings. The same functionality is available from both the Visual Studio and command line experiences.

CLI Experience

We have just updated the .NET Upgrade Assistant CLI tool with a new engine used in the Visual Studio extension of Upgrade Assistant. Now you can port any type of app and leverage the power of AI in your upgrading journey.

To install this global .NET tool, use the following command:

    dotnet tool install -g upgrade-assistant

To update this tool to the latest available version, call:

    dotnet tool update -g upgrade-assistant

Now as the tool is installed, you can use it to port your applications. Navigate to the directory that contains the project you want to upgrade and call the command:

    upgrade-assistant upgrade

The CLI tool provides an interactive way of choosing which project to upgrade and which version of .NET to target. Use the arrow keys to select an item and press Enter to run the item.

For more details, refer to our documentation:

Visual Studio experience

If you have read my previous blogs, Upgrading your .NET projects with Visual Studio and Announcing a new version of the .NET Upgrade Assistant with support for .NET MAUI and Azure Functions!, you might be familiar with the Visual Studio extension for this tool. Once you install it, you can upgrade your projects by right-clicking on the project in the Solution Explorer window, and selecting Upgrade.

.NET Upgrade Assistant in Visual Studio

For more details, refer to our documentation:

Give us feedback

Please give us your feedback so we can build the right tools for you! Fill out this brief survey.

You can also file issues or feature requests from Visual Studio by choosing Help | Send Feedback. Make sure to mention “Upgrade Assistant vsix” in the title.

Olia Gavrysh Senior Product Manager, .NET

Read next

8 comments

Discussion is closed. Login to edit/delete existing comments.

  • Mark Adamson 6

    This looks great. It would be really useful if it had an option to purely convert a legacy project to the SDK project format. This is often the first step we do when migrating a legacy application because we can then get it merged in reasonably quickly and then follow up with updates to .net standard and then .net core at a later point.

    • Horný Petr 1

      I agree with this. Having the option to convert the project to SDK format would save a lot of work.

  • Jan Seris 0

    When news for WinForms?

  • André R. 1

    Any plans for simplifying upgrade/migration of asp.net framework web forms projects to asp.net core?

    For instance opening a community project that provides a compatibility layer that upgrade assistance can migrate code to would streamline the process a lot.

      • André R. 1

        Indeed, but like documentation they all have sections such as this implying a Side-by-side incremental project upgrade with step is to rewrite all logic which is a lot of work:

        Now we can start moving routes over one at a time to the ASP.NET Core app. These could be MVC or Web API controllers (or even a single method from a controller), Web Forms ASPX pages, HTTP handlers, or some other implementation of a route. Once the route is available in the ASP.NET Core app, it will then be matched and served from there.

        What I’m suggesting is that now that migration assistance is mature, next major step to lower the migration threshold is somehow automate / semi automate migration / porting of the code as well in these cases. There are many ways to do that, I’m only suggesting MS opening up a community project on things like webforms, as it’s probably the fastest way to get results, like was already done for Windows Forms, WPF and WCF (client side).

  • Jignesh Jethva 0

    @Team – Does new upgrade-assistant version works with non-interactive mode command ? and entry point command ?
    Example : upgrade-assistant upgrade “Solution path” –non-interactive -e *

Feedback usabilla icon