Want to move to .NET 5? In this session you'll see how to approach porting projects from .NET Framework, .NET Core, and .NET Standard to .NET 5 and the tools you can use to get there.

1. Porting projects
to .NET 5
Immo Landwerth
Phillip Carter
Program Managers .NET

2. .NET 5 Vision Recap

3. One .NET vision
.NET Framework
Mono / Xamarin
.NET Core.NET
Single SDK, one BCL, unified toolchain
Cross-platform native UI
Cross-platform web UI
Cloud native investments
Continue improvements in speed, size, diagnostics, Azure services
.NET has the best of breed solutions for all modern workloads
– .NET 5 to 6 "wave"

4. What does this actually mean?
.NET Framework 4.8
Mono / Xamarin
.NET Core 3.1 .NET Core 4.0.NET 5.0
No more features, only fixes
.NET 6

5. What is not in .NET 5?
• AppDomains, remoting, Web forms, WCF server and
Windows workflow remain on .NET Framework 4.8 only.
• There are no plans to port these.
Component Replacement
AppDomains  AssemblyLoadContext
Remoting  named pipes
 gRPC
WebForms  ASP.NET Blazor
WCF Server  gRPC
 Open source community project: https://github.com/CoreWCF/CoreWCF
WF  Open source community project: https://github.com/UiPath/corewf

6. Simplified framework names in .NET 5
• net5.0. This is for code that runs everywhere. It combines
and replaces the netcoreapp and netstandard names.
• net5.0-windows (and later net6.0-android and net6.0-
ios). These TFMs represent OS-specific flavors of .NET 5 that
include net5.0 plus OS-specific functionality.
netX.Y-windows
netX.Y
netX.Y-android netX.Y-ios netX.Y-<os>
netcoreapp3.1
netstandard2.1

7. What will Microsoft libraries target?
Area Target Framework
Cross Platform Libraries
ASP.NET Core, EF, virtually all System.*
packages, most libraries
net5.0
Windows Controls
WinForms-, WPF-, and (managed) UWP controls
net5.0-windows
Cross Platform Abstractions
Xamarin Essentials, Xamarin Forms, MAUI, or
any other cross-platform abstraction
net5.0
And each OS-specific framework that it
provides implementations for
Cross Platform Libraries for .NET Framework
Azure SDK, Microsoft.Data.SqlClient and other
packages that need to support .NET Framework
netstandard2.0

8. What should you target?
• Continue to use netstandard2.0 to share
code between .NET Framework and all other
platforms.
• Consider using netstandard2.1 to share code
between Mono, Xamarin, and .NET Core 3.x
(less relevant with .NET 6).
• Use net5.0 for code sharing moving forward.

9. Porting to .NET 5
• Understand if you need to port at all
• Only port projects that you need to innovate in
• Maintenance-only projects can safely remain on
.NET Framework
• Make note of your desired target:
• .NET Core 3.1 vs. .NET 5
• Windows vs. MacOS vs. Linux
• Plan & ensure you have click stops
• So that you can keep shipping working software
2. Inventory
3. Convert Project
4. Move to .NET 5
5. Move to other OS
1. Understand goals

10. Porting to .NET 5
• Inventory your code and its dependencies
• Use API Port to do that
• Analyze your code for legacy
• Maybe you can drop that before porting
• Analyze your dependencies
• Ensure they offer support for .NET 5
3. Convert Project
4. Move to .NET 5
5. Move to other OS
1. Understand goals
2. Inventory

11. Porting to .NET 5
• Replace packages.config
• With <PackageReference> elements in the project
• Migrate the project files to SDK-style
• Use Try-Convert to automate this
• Consider only migrating the project files
• and not changing the target framework yet
• Click stops!
2. Inventory
4. Move to .NET 5
5. Move to other OS
1. Understand goals
3. Convert Project

12. Porting to .NET 5
• Understand your dependency graph
• Identify if you have shared components that needs
to continue to work on .NET Framework
• Retarget those to .NET Standard
• Retarget remainder to .NET Core 3.1 or
.NET 5
2. Inventory
3. Convert Project
5. Move to other OS
1. Understand goals
4. Move to .NET 5

13. Porting to .NET 5
• If you want to go cross-platform:
• Ensure you have a CI system that can support
multiple legs
• Azure DevOps, GitHub actions etc.
• Add a leg per operating system
• And run tests!
2. Inventory
3. Convert Project
4. Move to .NET 5
1. Understand goals
5. Move to other OS

14. Demo
try-convert on a solution

15. Try-Convert Limitations
• It can’t convert some project types, such as
• ASP.NET
• Xamarin
• It doesn’t migrate any source code (*.cs), only project files
(*.csproj)

16. Docs!
We have docs that cover how to port to .NET 5
and what tools to use
https://aka.ms/net-porting-docs

17. API Port
Use it to assess understand your application
its dependencies, and how compatible they
are with .NET Core
$ dotnet tool install –g apiport

18. Try-Convert
Use it to convert your project files to .NET 5
and .NET Standard
dotnet tool install -g try-convert

19. Visual Studio 2019 16.8 GA and 16.9 Preview
visualstudio.com/download
aka.ms/vs-preview
Dev environments in the cloud .NET productivity
AI-assisted productivity
Automated CI/CD workflow Preview
Git workflows
Linux diagnostics
XAML productivity
• GitHub Codespaces available as a limited “preview”
for ASP.NET Core, .NET Core and C++
• Team Completions: Get C# contextual suggestions for
your own types, through custom models shared with
your team
• GitHub Actions workflow from within Visual Studio for
your .NET Core apps
• Easily execute your daily Git operations using the Git
Changes window
• Browse and manage your Git repository and stop
worrying about merge conflicts
• Roslyn analyzers are now included in the .NET 5.0 SDK
• .NET Code Style analyzers can now be enforced on build Preview
• .NET Core Debugging with WSL 2 using the
Linux distro of your choice Preview
• Debug managed Linux core dump
• XAML Binding Failures diagnostic
improvements
• XAML Hot Reload supports UWP

20. Q& A
Immo Landwerth
Program Manager .NET
@terrajobst
Phillip Carter
Program Manager .NET
@_cartermp

21. Thanks for joining!

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25. Demo
Presenter

26. Code Sample
Code sample