Tips & Tricks: Seamless Migration to ASP.NET Core 7

The.NET team released the.NET Upgrade Helper tool last year to make the transition from the.NET Framework to current.NET targets simpler. Since then, the team has been working diligently to refine features and close gaps in the upgrade tooling story.

Since the release of.NET 7, there are more tooling choices available to make the switch from.NET Framework to.NET 7 easier. This post explains those upgrades, including the new Upgrade Assistant features and some new ASP.NET Incremental Migration Tooling and System tools designed specifically for web scenarios. The Web Adapters.

Despite the fact that there are more tools available currently, each one plays a specific part in the upgrade process:

• Utilize the old analysis mode and the new binary analysis mode of Upgrade Assistant to analyze the upgrade work, which are both covered in greater depth later in this article.
• To upgrade class libraries, WPF, WinForms, console, or WCF apps while they are running, use the Upgrade Assistant.
• By gradually transferring endpoints to a new ASP.NET Core project, you can upgrade ASP.NET apps using the ASP.NET Incremental Migration Tooling.
• To facilitate communication between the old and new projects, combine System.Web Adapters with ASP.NET Incremental Migration. Moreover, use System.Web Adapters to migrate class libraries.

The most recent Upgrade Assistant documentation and announcements are available on GitHub at https://github.com/dotnet/upgrade-assistant.

The most recent documentation and announcements regarding the ASP.NET Incremental Migration Tooling and System are available at https://github.com/dotnet/systemweb-adapters.

Upgrade Process

Although additional tools are available to assist, the general procedure for moving from.NET Framework to.NET 7 remains unchanged. Figure below depicts the stages in detail.

Step 1. Reviewing Process

To update a project from the.NET Framework to .NET 7, the first step is to prepare for the upgrade by understanding the work that will be involved and, if necessary, by making preparatory changes to the solution.

During this phase of migration, specific actions include:

1. The project’s dependencies are being examined.

This includes the third-party packages, other projects you are working on, and the.NET Framework APIs on which your app depends. Look out for any dependencies or APIs that will be challenging to replace when examining dependencies or APIs that won’t operate with.NET 7 (such as NuGet packages). It may be a warning sign that an upgrade will need more substantial changes if missing NuGet packages or APIs are used in popular or high priority code pathways.

• A new binary analysis command for Upgrade Assistant is currently in preview. In this article’s Upgrade Assistant section, you may find instructions on how to utilize this new command. The binary analysis tool in Upgrade Assistant will provide information on the.NET Framework APIs that your project uses and whether or not those APIs are supported by.NET 7.
• The current Analyze command in Upgrade Assistant is also helpful when getting ready for an upgrade because it draws attention to changes that Upgrade Assistant suggests, such as particular NuGet packages that need to be updated or other alterations that are needed in the project’s configuration or source code.

2. Choose Targeted Framework

You might want to aim for.NET Standard 2.0,.NET Standard 6, or.NET 7 when upgrading from.NET Framework. Depending on your project and whether you choose Long Term Support (LTS) or Current versions, Upgrade Assistant, if you’ll be utilizing it, will suggest a suitable target. You can find additional information about the.NET support policy at https://dotnet.microsoft.com/platform/support/policy/dotnet-core. The target framework must be chosen by you if you’re manually updating the project file or using incremental migration tooling. Considerations include:

• Libraries can be shared between.NET 6/7 callers and.NET Framework callers using a.NET Standard 2.0 target. Class libraries are advised to target.NET Standard 2.0 due to its advantageous mobility, unless they have dependencies that call for a more constrained target framework. Because.NET Standard is merely an API definition and not a product that can be launched, executable projects (console programs, Windows desktop apps, and web apps like ASP.NET Core MVC or WebAPI projects) cannot target it.
• The most recent LTS version of.NET is version 6. It will thus receive support for a longer period of time than.NET 7. As opposed to Current releases, LTS releases are supported for three years after their release date. .NET 6 is a fantastic option if your project requires longer-term maintenance and none of the new capabilities in.NET 7.
• The most recent version of.NET is version 7. This indicates that it performs at its peak and has the newest features. Choose.NET 7 as the target framework name if you want to benefit from its advancements in your project.

3. Upgrading to .NET Framework 4.8

Prior to upgrading to.NET 7, it can make sense in some circumstances to retarget projects to.NET Framework 4.8. This can be useful for very large projects or projects that target earlier versions of the.NET Framework (before.NET Framework 4.5, for example), as it enables you to address breaking changes between the two versions of the framework independently of additional breaking changes when switching from.NET Framework to.NET 7. Upgrading to.NET Framework 4.8 isn’t necessary for small or medium-sized projects or those that are targeting more recent.NET Framework versions because there won’t be many major changes once.NET Framework 4.8 is released.

4. Order Projects

Last but not least, think about the order in which you will update each project in your solution to.NET 7. (or .NET Standard). It’s typically recommended to upgrade callers first, then lower-level dependencies (the “leaf nodes” of the project graph). When upgrading a solution using Upgrade Assistant, it suggests a sequence based on the dependencies of the projects in the solution and the project that you want to update to.NET 7 in the end.

Step 2. Upgrading Project File

You’re ready to start modernizing the project’s assets once you’ve prepared for the upgrade by comprehending the project’s dependencies and, maybe, by upgrading it to a newer version of the.NET Framework. The project file itself is the ideal place to begin because.NET 7 uses new, easier SDK-style project files.

This phase can be aided by the Incremental Migration Tooling as well as Upgrade Assistance.

• When upgrading a non-web project with Upgrade Assistant, the project file is upgraded in-place. The project’s csproj or vbproj file is updated by Upgrade Assistant in one of its initial phases so that it uses the new SDK-style format while still functioning identically to the old project file.
• When upgrading an ASP.NET application using incremental migration tooling, a new ASP.NET Core project is generated, into which endpoints can be incrementally moved. When more of the old project is transferred, references and other objects are added to the new project, which initially starts out empty.

You should check your NuGet package references to make sure they are accurate when you update the project file. In an SDK-style project, only the packages your project directly utilizes need to be mentioned (those packages’ references do not need to be specified), as opposed to the packages.config technique of referencing NuGet packages that was likely used in the original project. Again, tooling is helpful here. Unneeded package references are automatically removed by Upgrade Assistant, and Incremental Migration Tooling won’t add any extraneous package references at all to the new project.

Of course, in order for the new.NET target you’ll be utilizing to work, the NuGet references version may also need to be updated (.NET 6 or .NET 7). Both Incremental Migration and Upgrade Assistant update package versions.

The target framework name for the project has to be changed to reflect the new.NET platform as part of upgrading the project file. Whether.NET 6,.NET 7, or.NET Standard makes the most sense for the project, Upgrade Assistant automatically recognizes this and upgrades itself. The user can choose between.NET 6 and.NET 7 when starting a new project with incremental migration.

Step 3. Upgrading Project Source

The source code, configuration files, and other project assets must all be upgraded as the third phase in the transition from.NET Framework to.NET 7. The majority of the upgrade effort often consists of this.

While upgrading, various fixes to source code can be made automatically via Upgrade Assistant and Incremental Migration Tooling. When using Incremental Migration Tooling to migrate certain vertical slices of the app, fixes are made when the source code is moved from the old project to the new one. Upgrade Assistant applies patches automatically across the entire project.

The modifications required to update from.NET Framework to.NET 7 cannot be fully automated by any upgrade tooling, so keep that in mind. It will be necessary to make manual updates because the tools was unable to automate them, especially for application types (such web apps) that differ significantly from the.NET Framework. Even though the upgrade tooling will take care of the “easier” modifications so you can concentrate on those that call for a deeper understanding of the project, it won’t take care of all the changes that are required in any but the simplest of projects. Most of the time, upgrading source code to.NET 7 is a manual process that must be finished before the project can successfully compile and operate on the new target.

Step 4. Testing and Deploying

You’re almost done after the project builds using the new.NET target. But, don’t forget to test the modified project completely before releasing it. Even if an app is built successfully, runtime behavioral variations between the.NET Framework and.NET 7 versions might result in app failures. In addition to manually testing the upgraded project, make sure that all test suites are ported and passing to ensure that everything is functioning as it should.

You can deploy as soon as you’ve finished that. The upgraded program now has the option to operate on Linux or in Linux-based containers, so deployment may look a little different with it running on.NET 7. Also, you have the option of self-contained deployment, which comes with the.NET runtime and any libraries required by the program, or framework-dependent deployment, which uses the.NET runtime on the user’s computer. At https://docs.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/deploying, more information on.NET deployment models and choices (including ahead-of-time compilation and single-file deployment) is provided.

ASP.NET Incremental Migration

The ASP.NET Incremental Migration Tooling is one of the most intriguing new alternatives for upgrading. This toolset is a Visual Studio extension that enables developers to simultaneously develop new ASP.NET Core projects and ASP.NET apps using a straightforward GUI interface. Using a YARP proxy, the tools connects the two apps such that requests sent to the ASP.NET Core app are handled by it first and then proxied to the old ASP.NET app if it is unable to handle them. By using the Strangler Fig design, developers may progressively migrate functionality from their old ASP.NET app into a new ASP.NET Core app by adding new controllers or action methods without altering the original ASP.NET app. The app will continue to operate in the same manner from the end user’s perspective. As more of the app’s components are updated, it will gradually switch over to ASP.NET Core.

For class libraries and non-web apps, Upgrade Assistant is still the suggested solution, while for ASP.NET scenarios, ASP.NET Incremental Migration Tooling is advised.

Let’s Get Started with Incremental Migration

To get started, install the Visual Studio extension from https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=WebToolsTeam.aspnetprojectmigrations.

Once the extension is installed, you can choose “Migrate project” in the context menu when right-clicking on an ASP.NET app, as shown in Figure below.

A new ASP.NET Core project is created and configured with a YARP proxy to automatically forward any requests it can’t handle to the original ASP.NET app. A user interface (UI) appears allowing the user to select the target framework (.NET 6 or.NET 7) and template to use (MVC or WebAPI) for the new project. An modification to the project launch configuration makes it possible to start debugging both the old and new web projects by pressing F5 in Visual Studio.

Incrementally Migrating Project Components

You have the option to migrate classes, controllers, or views after the new project is established. To migrate a component, simply right-click on it in the solution explorer or editor in Visual Studio and select the Migrate menu option. As seen in Figure below, the UI will present a tree view of the selected component and its dependencies. Other classes, views, NuGet packages, or project-to-project linkages can all be dependencies. You can select which of the dependencies to transfer from the migration user interface (by default, all direct dependencies are selected).

The selected item and all selected dependents are copied into the new project when the Migrate Selection button is clicked. The tooling updates source code when copying source files, performing various transformations to bring it closer to what is required to run on ASP.NET Core (fixing up some common ASP.NET namespace changes, for example, or replacing types with near equivalents in ASP.NET Core). The tooling changes the packages to more recent versions that are compatible with the newer.NET version in the new project as it copies NuGet dependencies. Naturally, as was already said, transferred source files will need more human fixes before they can be built and used in the new project. But, you can overcome that difficulty by tackling a tiny aspect of the program at a time utilizing the Incremental Migration Tooling.

The original ASP.NET app is left unchanged, with the exception of a few properties in the csproj file that enable the migration process, so it will continue to function as usual.

System.Web Adapters

The Incremental Migration Tooling extension and “System.Web Adapters,” an open-source project developed by the ASP.NET team, make it simpler to migrate code from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core. Visit https://github.com/dotnet/systemweb-adapters to access the project. You can find out more about the project there, report bugs, and even send pull requests to help out.

The System.Web Adapters project has two parts:

• A core package of adapters.
• Extensions that make it easier to work with an ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core project side-by-side, as in the case of incremental migration.

Adapters Package

The lowest-level component of the System.Web Adapters is the Microsoft.AspNetCore.SystemWebAdapters package. This package targets .NET Standard and contains adapters for common System.Web APIs, such as HttpContext.Current and APIs on HttpRequest, HttpResponse, and many other types. When used by a .NET Framework caller, the adapters type-forwards references to these types to the actual implementations in System.Web. When used from a .NET 6 or .NET 7 caller, the package shims the calls to equivalent ASP.NET Core calls.

Using Microsoft.AspNetCore.SystemWebAdapters, developers can use code that depends on these common System.Web APIs while targeting .NET Standard 2.0 and have it work on either ASP.NET or ASP.NET Core. This has benefits in two scenarios:

• By using the adapters package, class libraries with System.Web dependencies can be upgraded to target .NET Standard 2.0 with minimal code changes. This makes upgrading a large web solution much simpler. By targeting class libraries to .NET standard, they can be used by upstream callers that are still targeting .NET Framework and by callers that are upgraded to ASP.NET Core and .NET 7. This is especially useful in incremental migration scenarios because it allows the original ASP.NET app and the new ASP.NET Core app in the migration scenario to share class libraries.
• Using the System.Web Adapters can also help minimize code changes when initially migrating code to an ASP.NET Core project during incremental migration. Although the APIs supported by the adapters package are prioritized around what’s most likely to be used in libraries, there’s enough overlap with APIs used in MVC scenarios that they provide some value getting migrated classes working on ASP.NET Core, as well. It will be necessary to update instances of System.Web APIs being used from the migrated ASP.NET Core app eventually, but the System.Web Adapters can be useful in getting things working initially.

Services Packages

The System.Web Adapters project, in addition to the adapters package, has new functionality that makes it easier for ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core apps to cooperate in incremental upgrade scenarios. Both the Microsoft.AspNetCore.SystemWebAdapters.FrameworkServices package for usage in ASP.NET apps and the ASP.NET Core app provide this additional capabilities (Microsoft.AspNetCore.SystemWebAdapters.CoreServices).

The services are enabled in the ASP.NET Core app by calling AddSystemWebAdapters and UseSystemWebAdapters in their main method, as shown in this code snippet. This makes SystemWebAdapters services available in the app’s dependency injection container and registers SystemWebAdapters middleware.

using Microsoft.AspNetCore.SystemWebAdapters;
var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

// Add System.Web adapter services to the container
builder.Services.AddSystemWebAdapters();

builder.Services.AddReverseProxy()
.LoadFromConfig(builder.Configuration.GetSection("ReverseProxy"));

builder.Services.AddControllersWithViews();

var app = builder.Build();

// Additional middleware goes here

// Add System.Web adapter middleware
app.UseSystemWebAdapters();

app.MapDefaultControllerRoute();
app.MapReverseProxy();

The System once. Endpoints in the ASP.NET Core app can choose to imitate ASP.NET behaviors in order to behave as they did in the legacy app. This is done by registering Web Adapter middleware. Some optional ASP.NET-emulated behaviors include pre-buffering requests, forcing a request to be served by a single thread, setting the value of Thread.CurrentPrincipal, and buffering both requests and responses. These behaviors can be enabled by default using extension methods in the app’s startup route, or controllers and action methods can opt into them using attributes. The System.Web Adapters documentation may be found at https://github.com/dotnet/systemweb-adapters/blob/main/docs/usage guidance.md for more details.

On the ASP.NET side of things, System.Web Adapter services are enabled by registering the SystemWebAdapters module in the app’s web.config (this happens automatically when the FrameworkServices package is installed) and by calling Application.AddSystemWebAdapters() in the app’s Application_Start method.

It’s recommended to enable the System.Web Adapter services’ proxy support, which will cause values like the request URL to match the app’s public entry point even though the requests have been proxied to the ASP.NET app. That support is enabled by calling AddProxySupport in the app’s Application_Start method:

protected void Application_Start()
{
    SystemWebAdapterConfiguration.AddSystemWebAdapters(this).AddProxySupport(
        options => options.UseForwardedHeaders = true);
}

Full details on setting up the ASP.NET app to take advantage of new functionality in the System.Web Adapters is available in documentation at https://github.com/dotnet/systemweb-adapters/blob/main/docs/framework.md.

Remote App Authentication and Session

The System.Web Adapters services packages also enable sharing authentication and session state between the ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core apps. This means that if a user signs in using an endpoint in the original ASP.NET app or sets session items on such an endpoint, the same identity and session items will be available when the user navigates to an endpoint served by the ASP.NET Core app. Similarly, session items written from the ASP.NET Core app will be available to the ASP.NET app.

Although session and authentication work differently in ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core, the System.Web Adapters enable these features to work in incremental migration scenarios by allowing the ASP.NET Core app to make requests to the ASP.NET app behind the scenes to determine user identity and session items. Any changes to session state are similarly written to the ASP.NET app. So, the ASP.NET app serves as the source of truth for authentication and session information.

These features are enabled by calling AddRemoteAppClient on the ASP.NET Core app’s ISystemWebAdapterBuilder (returned by adding System.Web services to the app’s services) and by calling AddRemoteAppServer on the ASP.NET app’s ISystemWebAdapterBuilder (returned by the call to Application.AddSystemWebAdapters). These remote app calls allow the user to configure the connection between the ASP.NET Core and ASP.NET apps – specifying a security key so that the ASP.NET app knows requests for session or auth information are legitimate and specifying the base URL of the ASP.NET app for the ASP.NET Core app to communicate with.

To enable sharing session information between the two apps, the ASP.NET app must call AddSession and configure a serializer that will be used for writing and reading sessions state to/from the ASP.NET Core app. Serialization is typically done with the System.Web Adapters’ JsonSessionSerializer, but users can implement their own serializers if needed. As part of configuring the serializer, the developer must register session item keys that will be used and specify the types of the corresponding session items. This registration with typing information is necessary to securely deserialize session items.

Similarly, to enable shared authentication to work, the ASP.NET app must add a call to AddAuthentication in order to enable endpoints that will deliver user identity to the ASP.NET Core app.

Altogether, with both remote authentication and remote session enabled, the code in global.asax.cs ends up looking like this:

SystemWebAdapterConfiguration
      .AddSystemWebAdapters(this)
      .AddProxySupport(options => options.UseForwardedHeaders = true)
      .AddRemoteAppServer(remote => remote.Configure(options => 
          options.ApiKey = "MySecureKey")
      .AddAuthentication()
      .AddSession())
      .AddJsonSessionSerializer(o =>
          {
              o.KnownKeys.Add("myInt", typeof(int));
              o.KnownKeys.Add("mObject", typeof(DemoModel));
          });

On the ASP.NET Core side, sharing session state and shared authentication are enabled in the same way. AddSession and AddAuthentication are called while configuring the ISystemWebAdapterRemoteClientAppBuilder, and a serializer is registered with the ISystemWebAdapterBuilder along with session items that are expected.

builder.Services.AddSystemWebAdapters()
       .AddRemoteAppClient(remote => 
           remote.Configure(ConfigureRemoteAppOptions)
       .AddAuthentication(true)
       .AddSession())
       .AddJsonSessionSerializer(o =>
       {
           o.KnownKeys.Add("myInt", typeof(int));
           o.KnownKeys.Add("mObject", typeof(DemoModel));
       });

Keep in mind that the call to AddAuthentication in ASP.NET Core requires a Boolean parameter. This setting determines whether or not the app’s default authentication method should be remote app authentication. Every time a request is made to an ASP.NET Core app, the user identity is retrieved from the ASP.NET app if remote app authentication is the default configuration. If this scheme is not the default, identification will only be collected from the ASP.NET app in response to requests made to endpoints equipped with an authentication attribute:

[Authorize(AuthenticationSchemes = "Remote")]

The disadvantage of using remote app authentication as the default scheme is that every request the ASP.NET Core app serves requires an HTTP call to the ASP.NET app in order to retrieve the user’s identity. This avoids the need to add these attributes and makes the user’s identity available everywhere. The remote identity can be utilized more strategically only when necessary by not using remote app authentication as the default scheme.

Similar to the last example, sharing session state is disabled by default because it necessitates HTTP queries to the ASP.NET app. Instead, the [Session] element should be added to controllers or action methods that need to communicate session state with the ASP.NET app.

Because the System.Web Adapters libraries are still in preview at the time this article is being written, some small changes may be made to the API (method names, etc.) prior to the article being published. Full details and all the latest details on configuring and using shared session and shared authentication in incremental migration scenarios are available in the System.Web Adapter documentation at https://github.com/dotnet/systemweb-adapters/tree/main/docs.

.NET Upgrade Assistant

Although though System.Web Adapters and Incremental Migration Tooling provide migration support for ASP.NET situations, the.NET Upgrade Assistant is still the suggested solution for updating class libraries, console apps, Xamarin apps, and Windows Desktop apps while they are already running. A number of new features have been introduced to Upgrade Assistant since its debut last year, most notably the capacity to scan binaries, compare the surface area of the.NET Framework APIs being used with that of.NET 7, and upgrade a new category of projects: WCF server projects.

Binary Analysis

The.NET Portability Analyzer was previously used by customers to determine how many of the.NET Framework APIs they had previously used were not accessible on the.NET platform they were moving to. This functionality has been added to Upgrade Assistant in order to replace the.NET Portability Analyzer, which is now being deprecated. You can now analyze.NET API usage with the same tool and update your projects.

The binary analysis function of Upgrade Assistant varies from its previous analyze command in that it runs the same analysis as the upgrade command and reports on items that need to be altered (source code to update, package versions to update, etc.) And instead of comparing API usage to a list of which APIs are accessible on which.NET platforms, the binary analysis feature examines API usage.

You must specify an environment variable to make binary analysis available in Upgrade Assistant till it is completely functional.

Set UA_FEATURES=ANALYZE_BINARIES

Once the UA_FEATURES variable is set to ANALYZE_BINARIES, Upgrade Assistant has a new command available to it: analyzebinaries. There are several useful options that can be passed to the analyzebinaries command. Among them are:

• -f <format>: This option allows specifying the output format for the report that’s generated. Options are HTML or Sarif. Sarif is a well-known JSON format used to store diagnostic information. Visual Studio can display data from Sarif files in its error list and extensions are available to visualize Sarif in Visual Studio Code.
• -t <Current | LTS | Preview>: This option allows specifying which .NET target you intend to upgrade to so APIs used in the app can be compared to that target. Specifying Current compares against .NET 7 and LTS compares against .NET 6. Preview also compares against .NET 7 for the time being but soon it will compare against .NET 8 previews.
• -p <Linux | Windows>: The platform option allows specifying whether the upgrade project will run on Windows or Linux so that the API surface area can be adjusted for the desired environment.

The analyzebinaries command uses compiled binaries rather than project or solution files to run, in contrast to other Upgrade Assistant commands. Thus, you must give a dll or a folder containing one or more.NET assemblies as your input. This means that even against dependencies that you do not own, you can use the analyzebinaries command. If you need to determine whether a binary requirement is likely to function on.NET 7, this can be helpful. Nevertheless, you should exercise caution when using the command on NuGet binaries. As NuGet packages frequently contain different binaries for various targets, it is typically useless to check whether a specific assembly from NuGet makes use of unsupported APIs. Further assemblies or newer versions of the package with more supported.NET platforms can be available for the package for various targets. With the help of Upgrade Assistant’s analyze command, NuGet dependencies can be better understood.

To use analyzebinaries, it’s recommended to copy the assemblies you own source code for as well as any binary dependencies that cannot be upgraded to newer .NET 7-native versions through other means (not NuGet output or .NET Framework binaries) into a temporary folder. Then, run the analyzebinaries command using options appropriate for your scenario. For example:

upgrade-assistant analyzebinaries -t LTS -f html .\binaryoutput

Upgrade Assistant reads the assemblies and generates a report showing any APIs that aren’t supported on the target version of .NET, as well as APIs that are available but require additional NuGet references, as shown in Figure below.

CoreWCF

In April of 2022, version 1.0 of the CoreWCF community project was released. This project makes many server-side WCF APIs available for .NET 6 and .NET 7. At the same time as the 1.0 release, Microsoft announced that it would support CoreWCF usage in production scenarios and that it was a recommended path forward for customers with server-side WCF dependencies who wanted to upgrade to .NET 6 or .NET 7, but who could not easily remove the dependency on WCF. More details on CoreWCF and Microsoft support for the project is available at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/corewcf-v1-released. To learn more about CoreWCF, be sure to check out Sam Spencer’s article on CoreWCF elsewhere in this issue of CODE Magazine or go to https://github.com/corewcf/corewcf.

To help customers looking to use CoreWCF as a means of upgrading to .NET 7, Upgrade Assistant now supports upgrading self-hosted WCF scenarios to CoreWCF. No new commands are needed – just use a recent version of Upgrade Assistant and a new upgrade step (shown in Figure below) will look for self-hosted WCF services and, if found, help to upgrade them to CoreWCF.

Setting up the ServiceHost is where the majority of the CoreWCF transitional adjustments are made. Several WCF settings that were previously put up programmatically are now stated in configuration. The new CoreWCF upgrade phase in Upgrade Assistant will assist in converting the configuration’s necessary changes into code while leaving the remaining configuration for CoreWCF to use. Anyone who has previously set up an ASP.NET Core web host will be able to recognize the new code paths because CoreWCF operates on top of ASP.NET Core. Existing service contracts and implementations ought to continue to function normally because CoreWCF attempts to be as compatible with WCF as feasible.

Upgrade Tooling Roadmap

New Upgrade Assistant capabilities, such as a binary analysis command, new Incremental Migration tooling for ASP.NET scenarios through a Visual Studio extension, and adapter libraries to facilitate upgrading web scenarios have all been introduced in this article.

The teams developing these tools will continue to concentrate on giving them more capability and coordinating them with one another. It’s nice that there is additional tooling now for moving to.NET 7, but over time, these tools will start to combine and assist one another more effectively. The Upgrade Assistant command-line experience and the Incremental Migration extension’s Visual Studio experience will both remain available, but work is being done to share the internal logic of these two tools so that they provide comparable experiences (through different user interfaces) and enable users to create extensions that can be used with either toolset.

The.NET upgrade toolset is still in its infancy and is evolving quickly. Please participate in their growth as you work with the tools. You may influence the direction of.NET upgrade tooling by providing feedback, reporting issues, and generating pull requests. At https://github.com/dotnet/upgrade-assistant, you can offer suggestions and make contributions to Upgrade Assistant.

Similarly, you can connect with the System.Web Adapters project and create issues or pull requests at https://github.com/dotnet/systemweb-adapters. Although the Incremental Migration Visual Studio extension isn’t currently open source, you can still provide feedback on it through the System.Web Adapters GitHub repo.

Bottom Line

Many new features and performance enhancements are available in.NET 7. Even though it is supported, projects that target the.NET Framework are unable to use the newest runtime capabilities, language features, performance enhancements, and community libraries. It can be difficult to upgrade from the.NET Framework to.NET 7, especially for some app models like ASP.NET that have undergone significant changes, but there are tools available to help, such as Upgrade Assistant and Incremental Migration Tooling for ASP.NET.

While Upgrade Assistant can help analyze the work that needs to be done and help with many of the modifications needed to transfer libraries, console apps, Windows Desktop or Xamarin apps to.NET 7, no tool can fully automate the shift from.NET Framework to.NET 7. The new Incremental Migration Tooling for ASP.NET, on the other hand, offers a visual interface for incrementally migrating ASP.NET app functionality to ASP.NET Core on.NET 7 one component at a time. The Program. As well as enabling crucial interoperability scenarios between ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core apps in incremental upgrade scenarios, Web Adapters libraries allow sharing web-based code between.NET Framework and.NET 7.

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