Visual Studio Gets a .NET Upgrade Assistant

Microsoft announced a new Visual Studio extension that will help developers upgrade their .NET applications to the latest .NET version. This should prove friendlier than the current command line tool.

“We are happy to introduce .NET Upgrade Assistant as a Visual Studio extension and will upgrade your .NET Framework or .NET Core web- and desktop apps,” Microsoft’s Olia Gavrysh writes. “Now you can upgrade any .NET application to the latest version of .NET inside of Visual Studio.”

Upgrading application projects to a new .NET version has always been difficult, especially if they were based on the legacy .NET Framework. But with the Upgrade Assistant, you can just right-click the project in Solution Explorer and choose “Upgrade.” Eventually, the assistant will support all .NET project types, but the initial version supports ASP.NET, .NET class libraries, .NET console apps, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps, and Windows Forms apps.

The .NET Upgrade Assistant supports in-place, side-by-side, and side-by-side incremental upgrades. And you can upgrade to .NET 6 (Long Term Support version) or .NET 7 (Standard Term Support version).

Additionally, the .NET Upgrade Assistant will soon support migration scenarios like Xamarin to .NET MAUI, Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to WinUI, and Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) to WCF Core.

You can download the .NET Upgrade Assistant from the Visual Studio Marketplace.