Upgrading with the .NET Upgrade Assistant

So since I wanted to upgrade my .NET Framework projects to .NET 6 I was looking around on how to do this and found an awesome tool provided by Microsoft!

My Experience with the .NET Upgrade Assistant

I think the .NET Upgrade Assistant is a cool little tool which really helps doing the initial migration to .NET 6 of a .NET Framework project. All in all I was rather impressed on how accurately it analyzed my projects and upgraded it step by step.

So to install it I opened a CMD with administrator rights. And then to check if the tool works properly I used the “upgrade-assistant” analyze command. It fully analyzed all my projects in a solution and created a file with the analysis results. Which was great and all but since I opened the CMD as administrator I was in the C:\WINDOWS\system32 directory and it wrote the log into the system directory of the Windows OS. So I really recommend to switch the directory before using the .NET Upgrade Assistant.

Afterwards I used the upgrade command to perform the initial upgrade of a project to .NET 6. All in all everything worked pretty good.

Things I didn’t like as much

So while everything worked pretty well, there were also things I didn’t like that much. One of these was how I had to hit enter after each step and then enter 1 and enter to perform the next step. Why do I have to hit enter after a step when I have to anyway choose what to do on the next step right after? I mean sure if I wanted to read the log of the previous step I would have to scroll upward but if it doesn’t have any warnings or errors I don’t really look at it anyway so I thought that pressing enter after every step was a bit unnecessary if I’m honest.

What I was a bit surprised about was how there were quite a few errors in my project now. For example one error was that the class Point did not exist and when I checked if there was an import in .NET 6 I can use Visual Studio found it and worked. Would have been nice if the .NET Upgrade Assistant also upgraded the imports.

Conclusion

Overall I would say it’s a great tool which can help you upgrade your projects to .NET 6.

Usefull Links

Migrating to .NET 6 overview

.NET Upgrade Assistant overview