Microsoft has released a Visual Studio extension that can be used to upgrade any .NET application to the latest version of .NET inside of Visual Studio.

Discussing the extension, Olia Gavrysh,  a Senior Program Manager on . NET team at Microsoft, said that:

"If your applications are built for .NET Framework or .NET Core, now is a great time to upgrade them to .NET 6 (Long Term Support version) or .NET 7 (Standard Term Support version) that have much better performance and give you access to the latest features and capabilities."

Gavrysh said that there have been huge improvements between .NET Framework and the latest .NET, but even if you’re targeting .NET Core 3.1 or earlier, it is now no longer supported as it reached the end of support in December 2022.

The new extension adds an 'upgrade assistant' to make it simpler to upgrade an application, as Microsoft admits that until now upgrading, especially from .NET Framework, was a complicated process involving either the Upgrade Assistant CLI tool or Microsoft Project Migrations.

The extension means that all developers need to do is to right-click on a project in Solution Explorer and choose “Upgrade”. The assistant will then take care of the mechanics, but depending on what framework and project type you’re upgrading from, there will be some manual post processing. Microsoft says the reason behind this is that while they've tried hard to ensure the assistant automatically fixes breaking changes, it cannot detect and fix all of them. So you might need to make some additional modifications to get the code to compile and you need to test thoroughly to ensure your code continues to work as expected.

The  extension is available now.

More Information

Visual Studio Website

.NET Upgrade Assistant On Microsoft Marketplace

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