• Identifies incompatibilities to.NET Core
• There are many known replacements
• Produces detailed compatibility assessments

“Porting.NET Framework apps to.NET Core allows customers to take advantage of the performance and cost savings of Linux. AWS stated that porting applications to.NET Core is a tedious task. Application owners should spend time identifying dependencies and APIs that are not compatible with.NET Core and estimating the effort required. Porting Assistant for.NET scans.NET Framework apps to find incompatibilities and finds known replacements. It then generates a detailed compatibility report. This reduces the manual effort required to modernize your applications to Linux. AWS claims that its tool is different from other.NET Framework to-.NET Core tools, including one from Microsoft. It can assess the entire tree of package dependencies, as well as common functionality, such as detecting incompatible interfaces. AWS also stated that it uses solution files for the starting point, making it easier to assess monolithic solutions with many projects. This eliminates the need to analyze and aggregate information about individual binaries. AWS developer advocate Steve Roberts stated that developers must search for compatible NuGet packages when porting.NET Framework apps. He also suggested that they update the package references in the application’s project folders, which need to be updated to.NET Core project format. They also need to find replacement APIs, as.NET Core only contains a subset the APIs in the.NET Framework. Developers must sort through lengthy lists of compile errors and warnings as they work to port the project. This is a difficult task, and could prove to be a deterrent to customers with large applications portfolios. The tool uses.NET Core 3.1 to target. It will eventually be upgraded to.NET 5 which is a unifying all things-.NET framework, due to debut in November. Source apps must have.NET Framework 3.5 (or higher) (version 4.8, which is the last — and most recent –.Net Framework version). It is only compatible with ASP.NET apps and Windows services. Roberts’ post explains how to use the porting assistance. He also notes that users can share their telemetry to improve the tool and generate data models for the tool’s suggestion engine. This data store is available on GitHub. This is the only component of the tool that is open-source at the moment. It is currently only available for AWS-provided builds. However, the company stated that it plans to open source it in the future so other people can make changes.