Porting .NET Framework applications to .NET core usually requires searching and updating compatible NuGet packages and their references. Project files need to be updated to the .NET Core file format as well. Taken together, this regime can become a tedious process.
With this in mind, today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the Porting Assistant for .NET, which is a new tool that helps customers analyze and port their .NET Framework applications to .NET Core running on Linux. Unlike competing tools offering the same utility, Amazon claims that its Porting Assistant assesses both the application source code and the full tree of public API and NuGet package to find incompatible dependencies with .NET Core and also suggests their replacements.
This suggestion system has been designed to improve over time by analyzing usage patterns and the frequency of missing packages and APIs. Rest assured, it is an opt-in program whereby customers willingly share their telemetry with the service. Moreover, the Porting Assistant also uses solution files as the starting point, and this makes it easier to assess monolithic solutions containing large numbers of projects, essentially doing away with the need to analyze and aggregate information on individual binaries.
Porting Assistant is now available and is free to use though it has a couple of prerequisites. Namely the .NET Core 3.1 SDK and a credential profile that is compatible with the AWS" CLI. For a complete walkthrough on how to get started with the tool, you may check out this blog post.