Microsoft announced that its .NET Upgrade Assistant extension for Visual Studio now supports migrating apps from some legacy frameworks to newer, more modern frameworks.

“We are happy to announce that we have released a new version of .NET Upgrade Assistant in Visual Studio that makes your upgrades to the latest .NET framework even easier,” Microsoft’s Olia Gavrysh writes in the announcement post. “The .NET Upgrade Assistant is a tool that helps you upgrade your application to the latest .NET and migrate from older platforms such as Xamarin Forms and UWP to newer offerings.

Microsoft released the .NET Upgrade Assistant extension for Visual Studio in February as a friendlier replacement for a previous command line tool. That version supported .NET Framework and .NET Core web- and desktop apps, but the plan was always to eventually support all .NET project types. And this latest update takes a big step into that future by adding support for some key migrations off of legacy Microsoft developer frameworks. That is, it now supports:

• .NET 8, which is currently in preview.
• Upgrading from Xamarin Forms to .NET MAUI
• Upgrading Azure Functions to version 4.x, which is based on .NET 6
• Upgrading from Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to WinUI
• ARM64

In addition to those notable additions, this update to the .NET Upgrade Assistant also adds a variety of other improvements related to how it updates NuGet packages, error handling, performance, and quality. You can learn more in the original blog post.

To install the .NET Upgrade Assistant, make sure Visual Studio is up-to-date and then navigate to Extensions > Manage Extensions in the app and search for “.NET Upgrade Assistant.” You will need to restart Visual Studio to complete the installation.