The **Upgrade assistant** automates the transition from an ASP.NET Standard project to an ASP.NET Core project. The tool employs the following steps. (You could plug in your own conversion steps.)

1. **Creates a backup** Upgrade assistant creates a backup because it is going to change important things. You can disable this step if you already have a backup, such as in a source code repository. (Is it possible to choose backup location?)

2. **Identifies solution conversion order** Upgrade assistant determines and recommends the order to migrate projects within a solution. You can accept the recommendation or decide on another order. See Analyzers.

3. **Runs try-convert** Upgrade assistant runs the try-convert tool to convert the project file from a cs-style project to an SDK-style project. (are there any configuration options?) The try-convert CLI tool is a standard Microsoft package and is found on [GitHub](🔗).

4. **Removes transitive NuGet package dependencies** Old NuGet package dependencies that may have been present in packages.config are removed.

5. **Re-targets project to ASP.NET Core**

6. **Updates NuGet packages** Upgrade assistant updates NuGet packages to versions compatible with ASP.NET Core. A config file uses a list with old package names and versions to map to new package names and versions. If a package is not needed, it is removed. NuGet package references should be .NET Core standard compatible. Upgrade assistant removes old packages and transitive dependencies, and then adds new packages. The tool then makes an extra restore to rebuild the lock files. After that, it runs a second pass to look for new transitive dependencies and removes those, just in case new unnecessary transitive dependencies were added by the new NuGet packages. This lets the tool remove redundant packages that were once needed but are unnecessary after the conversion.

7. **Adds template files** Upgrade assistant adds template files for startup and hosting code that is typically used in Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) environments. You can tweak the template files later. See Startup code.

8. **Migrates app config files** Upgrade assistant migrates non-C# files, like _web.config_, using an interface called IConfigUpdater that takes an array of config files and updates them to follow ASP.NET Core standard. You can also implement your own IConfigUpdater by dropping your libraries into a specific folder; they are picked up at runtime and converted. See Application configuration files.

9. **Updates source code** Upgrade assistant updates the source code by removing unnecessary namespace declarations that are not supported by ASP.NET Core, and adding namespace references that are supported instead. Some cases cannot be handled automatically because there may be too many differences between modules, such as converting HTTP modules to middleware. you must manually convert such cases.

When you have run the tool on your solution, the solution will most probably not build until you have manually completed some migration steps. Analyzers are added to help you identify some of the remaining changes needed after the tool runs.

## Install the Upgrade assistant

The **Upgrade assistant** automates common tasks related to migrating ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI projects to ASP.NET Core.

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Note

While Upgrade assistant does many of the migration tasks automatically for an ASP.NET project, you _will_ have manual migration tasks to complete the migration.

After you run Upgrade assistant on a project, the project will not build until you complete the migration (because the project is only partially migrated to .NET Core). Analyzers added to the project will highlight some of the remaining changes needed after the tool runs.

The Upgrade assistant is found in an open-source [GitHub](🔗) repository.

The Upgrade assistant is a general migration tool from ASP.NET standard to ASP.NET Core, but it links to another repository, the [Optimizely Migrator](🔗), that contains code for migrating Optimizely-specific things.

### Prerequisites

• The Upgrade assistant uses MSBuild to work with project files. Make sure that you have a recent version of MSBuild installed. An easy way to do this is to install Visual Studio 2019.

• This tool requires that your project builds. This may include installing [install Visual Studio 2019](🔗) to ensure build SDKs (such as for web applications, etc) are available.

To install the Upgrade assistant as a .NET CLI tool:

To upgrade the Upgrade assistant:

To try the latest (and likely less stable) versions of the tool, CI builds are available on the dotnet-tools NuGet feed and can be installed with

or updated using the same --add-source parameter.

### Troubleshoot installation issues

If installation fails, trying running the install command with the `--ignore-failed-sources` parameter: `dotnet tool install -g upgrade-assistant --ignore-failed-sources`. Upgrade-assistant is installed as a NuGet package, so invalid or authenticated sources in [NuGet configuration](🔗) can cause installation problems.

## Run the Upgrade assistant

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Tip

When running the assistant, you access help by typing:

Text



Use the following command to run the Upgrade assistant:

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Note

You can exit the Upgrade assistant in mid-migration and then resume it later. The progress of the migration process is saved to continue where you left off.

### Configuration arguments

## Analyzers

Analyzer functionality is included in the Upgrade assistant to analyze your solution and determine the components that need to be migrated to ASP.NET Core standard. After the analyzers evaluate your code, you can let the Upgrade assistant automatically convert your solution to ASP.NET Core.

Some tasks are not fully automated. For example, the Upgrade assistant does not handle Razor views or CSHTML, but the analyzer functionality does. The analyzer functionality flags non-ASP.NET Core standard with green squiggles directly in the Visual Studio project. You can fix these errors with **code quick fix** functionality in Visual Studio.

The analyzer also works on an already-converted solution, so when you open your updated ASP.NET Core site in Visual Studio and pull in more code that was not converted to ASP.NET Core standard, the analyzer flags any code that does not follow .NET Core standard (for example, occurrances of _System.Web_ or _Owin_).

The analyzer tool also works for non-framework libraries, such as business logic libraries.

• If you have a library that targets ASP.NET Standard and you convert this into ASP.NET Core, it cannot be consumed by ASP.NET Standard anymore.

• If you have a library with multiple solutions depending on it, other apps targeting this library cannot use it, so in this case you should have a full framework library and then a library specifically for ASP.NET Core code on the side, to make sure shared libraries can still be used by apps not on ASP.NET Core.

## Startup code

One challenge with going from ASP.NET Standard to ASP.NET Core is that you no longer have a _global.asax_ file, which let you write code that would run in response to higher "system level" events, such as Application\_Start, Application\_End, Session\_Start, Session\_End.

Instead, you have two methods, `Configure` and `ConfigureServices`, and a `Startup` class, and those are significantly different. These cannot be migrated automatically because there are too many app-specific things in _global.asax_.

At step 5 in the migration process (adding templates), you need four startup files: _Program.cs_, _Startup.cs_, _appsettings.json_, and _appsettings.Development.json_. If they are missing, Upgrade assistant creates them. It pulls some template files, changes some namespaces (_System.Web_ and _Owin_ are no longer used, and are removed) and then adds them to the project. Your old _Startup.cs_ is saved under the name _Startup.old.cs_.

In _Startup.cs_, you can configure services required by the app and define the app's request handling pipeline as a series of middleware components.

_Program.cs_ is often very similar from project-to-project and should not require many changes.

## Application configuration files replacing web.config

In previous versions of ASP.NET, _web.config_ stored application configuration settings such as database connection strings, global variables, and so on. In ASP.NET Core, the application configuration settings can come from different configurations sources such as files, user secrets, environment variables, or command-line arguments.

The _appsettings.json_ file stores configuration settings previously found in _web.config_. If you do not already have _appsettings.json_ in your solution, the Upgrade assistant creates one for you (by adding a template file in step 5) and migrates your _web.config_ settings to this file.

If you had a list of namespaces in _web.config_ that were automatically imported into Razor views, (such as `System.Web.Mvc.Html`, `System.Web.Routing`, `AlloyTemplates.Models.Pages`, and `AlloyTemplates.Models.Blocks`), you cannot automatically import these namespaces in the views using ASP.NET Core. In ASP.NET Core, you must import them by the _\_ViewImports.cshtml_ file instead. Upgrade assistant creates _\_ViewImports.cshtml_ and moves the namespaces from _web.config_ to this new file, along with TagHelpers because they can be useful in ASP.NET Core projects. Also, Upgrade assistant does not migrate namespaces starting with System.Web because they are not supported by ASP.NET Core; you should replace them with other namespaces.

The _appsettings.{Environment}.json_ file is a configuration file where {Environment} equals the application's current hosting environments, such as Development, Staging, or Production. This is valuable as you can use different appsettings for different environments.

## ExtensionManifest.json

The Upgrade assistant is divided into two repositories. The first one, \[], contains the general Upgrade assistant that handles general code conversions from ASP.NET standard to ASP.NET Core. The second repository, \[], contains code that is Optimizely specific.

In this second repository, there is an _ExtensionManifest.json_ file which contains the configuration settings for migrating Optimizely-specific code to ASP.NET Core. From the start, it looks something like this, with four sections for different configuration options for the migration steps.

• **ConfigUpdater** – For any configuration updaters.

• **PackageUpdater** – Contains the map file that maps old NuGet packages and versions to new packages and versions.

• **SourceUpdater** – For analyzers and code fix providers.

• **TemplateInserter** – Contains template files for the Optimizely-specific code, such as _Program.cs_ and _Startup.cs_.

## Related information

If you are just starting to look at .NET Core and want to understand more about potential challenges in migrating any particular project .NET Core, start by looking at .NET Framework dependencies the project has, and third-party libraries or NuGet packages it depends on, and understand whether those dependencies are likely to work on .NET Core. Resources that can help with that analysis include:

• [Port from .NET Framework to .NET](🔗)

• [Migrate from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core](🔗)

• [The .NET Portability Analyzer tool](🔗)

• [Upgrade an ASP.NET MVC App to ASP.NET Core with the .NET Upgrade Assistant](🔗)

• [Upgrade a Windows Forms App to ASP.NET Core with the .NET Upgrade Assistant](🔗)

• [Documentation of features not available on .NET Core](🔗)