Upgrading your .NET projects with Visual Studio

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  u8jka1b February 15, 2023 2:19 pm 0

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  Why the contradiction?

  Now you can upgrade any .NET application to the latest version of .NET inside of Visual Studio! …. Some project types are in development and coming soon, see the details below.

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    Immo Landwerth February 16, 2023 10:56 am 1

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    My read was that the Visual Studio extension is now enabled for all application types. Previously, the tooling was restricted to web projects. The later text qualifies what is delivered today vs what will come later.

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    Olia Gavrysh February 16, 2023 11:08 am 1

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    Yes to Immo, Upgrade Assistant already supports all mentioned project types and can do basic upgrade steps. For types mentioned in “coming soon”, more work is in progress to address changes needed for those particular project types, so more functionality will come soon.

    But yes, good point, thank you 🙂

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  Will Woo February 15, 2023 7:46 pm 0

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  “depending on what framework and project type you’re upgrading from, you should expect to do some manual post processing. While we try to automatically fix breaking changes, it cannot detect and fix all of them. So you might need to make some additional modifications …”

  “Besides changing the target framework version, the tool will be able to modify your code to fix breaking changes.”

  somewhat inconsistent.

  but, congratulations on this … if it actually works.

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    Michael Taylor February 16, 2023 7:41 am 2

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    I don’t believe this is inconsistent. You can refer to the underlying CLI tool on Github that backs this extension for more information but it automates the boilerplate conversion stuff. This is done using “extensions” that can be added (and you can define your own). There are extensions for some common stuff. For example it can take an app.config and generate an equivalent appsettings.json. It also knows how to convert an MVC controller to a .NET 6 controller. So that is what is meant by it will modify your code.

    But there is so many things it cannot possible convert that there is pretty much always a manual process after. For example if you’re using a third party IoC then it won’t understand how to convert that custom IoC code to the standard .NET 6 DI equivalent. It also won’t convert your EF 6 (NF) code to EF 7 (NET 6) code. All this is manual. Even the things it does modify will likely need to be updated. For example config files didn’t support hierarchy settings but JSON does so whereas you might have had an appsetting called myclient.clientid before you would have the same thing in JSON but it would be cleaner to have it as a myclient object with a clientid field. And of course all this should be managed using IOptions. The converter won’t handle any of this.

    In my experience it works well for getting a realistic app’s core code migrated but it won’t compile when you’re done and it definitely won’t run. You should still plan to take a while to fix things. I tend to lean toward doing an inplace upgrade of libraries and then a side-by-side isolated for the core app so I can better understand what the original code was doing.

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  Patrizio Gagliardi February 16, 2023 12:12 am 0

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  Until there is no methodology to replicate the session.onend() event it’s impossible to port certain .Net Framework applications. I understand the scalability, the cloud and bla bla bla but you should give devs a choice to use inproc & local.

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    Michael Taylor February 16, 2023 7:48 am 1

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    Session in ASP.NET Core can be inproc or distributed. This is fully supported. Not sure what you meant by that. It is pretty much required in server farm scenarios.

    Session end was never reliable even in .NET Framework so any code that relies on it could potentially not run anyway. This has always been true. If you need guaranteed cleanup of some session after it expires then this is probably better handled using a distributed cache and having the cache clean things up when it expires. At any point the web app could go down and no session cleanup would occur or the user could close the browser which would most likely wipe the session cookie but the server wouldn’t know. So you cannot really “clean up” anything inside the web app anyway. Of course this would only matter for resources that aren’t tied to memory.

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  Paulo Pinto February 16, 2023 12:20 am 6

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  Thanks for finally providing a graphical wizard in Visual Studio tradition of developer productivity.

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    Olia Gavrysh February 16, 2023 9:32 am 2

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    Thanks! We received feedback that developers would like a GUI experience in VS and that’s why we’ve built it. Please keep giving us your feedback so we can create better products for you!

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  Jens Samson February 16, 2023 2:11 am 1

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  How does it upgrade a VB.Net WinForms LINQ-2-SQL project ?

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    Michael Taylor February 16, 2023 7:50 am 2

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    It doesn’t. LINQ 2 SQL was deprecated a while back and isn’t supported in .NET 5+. Any code that relies on L2S would need to be updated to use newer technology. This would be part of the manual process the article mentions. The VB app could be upgraded though.

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      Jens Samson February 16, 2023 11:20 pm 0

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      So for us this is useless. I’ve been searching for an article by MS that shows how to convert L2S to EF Core for instance but apparantly nobody ever bothered to make something like that.

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        Michael Taylor February 17, 2023 8:27 am 1

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        I wouldn’t remain on a deprecated library just because nobody provided a walkthrough process. There are not many articles on converting from one database system to another and yet people do it quite a bit. Try this article for a starter though. At some point you are just going to have to rewrite the code but if you’ve properly architected your system then this is just a data layer change that shouldn’t impact the higher layer(s) and you could do this piecemeal if you have a really large code base. The one time we migrated from L2S to EF we were dealing with about 20 tables with a lot of relationships. Took about a week to migrate the code and do testing and a couple of weeks to retest the entire app.

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  Hugo Ferreira February 16, 2023 5:52 am 1

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  Like others said, yes, a text a bit contradictory.
  Looking forward for Xamarin => MAUI.
  I have the intention to port some day, but now I will wait for this plugin update.
  Even if the plugin only port 50%, it’s better than do 100% manual.

  This plugin also works with Visual Studio for macOS ?
  When you add the Xamarin => MAUI option do you also will annonce on this blog ?

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    Olia Gavrysh February 16, 2023 8:59 am 2

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    Thanks! The work for it is in progress and I’ll publish a new blog post devoted to Xamarin – > MAUI migration once it is released.
    For now, we are working on VS and not yet VS for Mac. We will listen to developers’ feedback to evaluate VS for Mac effort, so if it is crucial for you, you cannot port your app on Windows machine and need VS for Mac, please leave us a feature request in Visual Studio (top right corner).

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  Stuart Ballard February 16, 2023 8:46 am 0

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  You say ASP.NET from Framework, but that glosses over a pretty important concern: what does it do with ASP.NET Web Forms? My understanding is that the official MS position is that Web Forms aren’t ever coming to Core or modern .NET and therefore no automatic upgrade path is ever likely to be possible.

  If that’s changed and there is now a supported upgrade path for Web Forms projects, that’s huge and fantastic news! On the other hand, if the ASP.NET from Framework option only covers the MVC family of APIs, that really ought to be called out in the article.

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    Olia Gavrysh February 16, 2023 9:22 am 1

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    Thanks for pointing this out!

    Yes, you’re right, as we announced before, Web Forms is not coming to .NET Core and later versions of .NET. We tried to only bring forward modern technologies into the modern .NET platforms. ASP.NET Web Forms is very functional (and still supported), but we don’t consider it a modern way to build web apps.

    Few options to consider:
    – we have a book on how you can rewrite your application using Blazor.

    • if you don’t want to make changes to your code, you can leave the app on .NET Framework.

    • if you still want to use Web Forms on the modern .NET platform, you can try a third-party solution https://coreforms.net from Rubicon.

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  Michael Whalley February 16, 2023 10:15 am 0

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  I have a WPF .NET Framework 4.8 desktop Project that has been published to a number of users. If I upgrade the Project to .NET 6 (LTS) and re-publish, will users be prompted to instal .NET 6 or will the update fail on any user that doesn’t have it pre-installed? I am using ClickOnce for distributing new desktop versions.

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    David García February 19, 2023 3:18 pm 0

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    I have port a WPF .NET Framework 4.7.2 project to .NET 6 that is distributed through ClickOnce. The ClickOnce configuration now is in independent files so you can have different profiles to different types of distribution.

    One consideration point is the new requeriments of the application that now would require .NET 5, 6 or 7 that would need to be present in the client PC and ClickOnce doesn’t include new requeriments in update process. What I have done is to create the ClickOnce profile as framework independet so all the .NET components needed for the application are included with the ClickOnce distribution.

    But once said that, if you create the ClickOnce profile with the same configuration as the previos one the update would be transparent for the client.

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  Andrew Konkol February 16, 2023 10:15 am 1

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  I think there’s an error in the blog post describing the three types of upgrade types. I believe it should read as follows:

  Upgrade assistant supports 3 upgrade types. Different types are recommended for different project types, so you will see only those options that would work well for your app.

  In-place. In this case your original project will be upgraded all at once. If you are using source control and prefer to manage the copies yourself, for example, by using branches, this option is for you.

  Side-by-side. With this option your original project will be untouched, and a copy of it will be added to the solution which will contain the upgraded code. This type can be handy if your application has many dependencies that might be broken after the upgrade. This way you can check-in your progress and not worry about the application not building.

  Side-by-side incremental. This is the ideal choice for web applications.Upgrade from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core requires a lot of work and at times manual refactoring (because these two technologies are very different). …. etc….

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    Olia Gavrysh February 16, 2023 10:56 am 2

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    Thank you! Yes, that got messed up. Fixed.

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  Alexander Gayko February 16, 2023 2:26 pm 0

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  Hey, can the upgrade assistant extension migrate .net framework 4.8 .csproj files from old style to sdk style, keeping them .net framework 4.8? – this would be the first, manual step i’d want to do since we have a couple of framework-only dependencies and thus cannot migrate to “new” .net … yet.

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    Michael Taylor February 17, 2023 8:35 am 0

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    Take a look at this third party tool. Personally I find it is easier to just migrate it manually as in most cases you are literally just removing a lot of what is in the project file. There are a few gotchas though like embedded resources, T4 templates and designer files. But it isn’t too hard.

    Just be careful about what type of projects you migrate. For example if you migrate an app project and that project uses the Nuget packages.config file then switching to SDK will now use PackageReference. But that newer format doesn’t support package install scripts. Therefore you run into cases where you might install a Nuget package and it might want to update your project config or settings to work with .NET Framework, but it can’t. So we follow the rule that we switch to SDK format for all project types except those that are for apps. We special case apps that don’t rely on any Nuget packages that would require config changes though.

    An alternative approach is to run the upgrade assistant side-by-side to have it produce the new SDK project, then throw out the new project it generated and use the generated SDK project file for the old project.

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    Olia Gavrysh February 17, 2023 1:21 pm 0

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    Yes to everything that Michael Taylor said and also you can run Upgrade Assistant and then switch back your project to target .NET Framework, for some cases it would work. You can do it by simply replacing net6.0 to net48 in TargetFramework attribute in your project file.