News

.NET Upgrade Assistant Boosts MAUI as .NET 8 Nears GA

Microsoft upgraded its .NET Upgrade Assistant tool with improvements to .NET MAUI functionality and other new features as it gets ready to ship .NET 8 next month.

The .NET Upgrade Assistant is a Visual Studio tool available in the IDE's marketplace (63,887 installs as of this writing) that lets developers easily migrate from older platforms such as Xamarin.Forms and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to newer offerings in the latest .NET version. In about five weeks, that will be .NET 8, which sees improvements to web development including Blazor, native ahead-of-time compilation (native AOT), .NET MAUI and much more. All of that is summarized by Microsoft in its "What's new in .NET 8" documentation.

[Click on image for larger view.] NET Upgrade Assistant (source: Microsoft).

Many improvements to the tool concern .NET MAUI, the evolution of Xamarin.Forms with support for desktop apps in addition to mobile.

"First of all, now you can upgrade your apps on macOS as well using the CLI version of the .NET Upgrade Assistant," said Microsoft's Olia Gavrysh in an Aug. 29 announcement.

"If you prefer to upgrade your Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI manually, we have added automatic code fixers to help you update your code. Now you can paste your Xamarin.Forms files into a .NET MAUI project and our new Upgrade Assistant C# analyzer will offer to fix your code to make it compatible with .NET MAUI. You can see a light bulb near Xamarin namespaces that offers to fix the entire document or optionally project or solution."

[Click on image for larger view.] .NET MAUI Upgrade (source: Microsoft).

The other main new feature added to the upgrade assistant is the ability to update project features without changing the target framework.

"We have received feedback that in some cases you wanted to decouple .NET version upgrades from other types of upgrades, for example a very popular request was to enable conversion of the old style project file to the new SDK-style project file without changing the .NET framework version, so you can take an iterative approach in modernizing your applications," said Gavrysh, senior product manager for .NET. "Now on the first page of Upgrade Assistant, if there are any projects features upgrades available for your project, you will see two options: Upgrade project to a newer .NET version and Upgrade project features."

[Click on image for larger view.] A Project File Before and After an Upgrade (source: Microsoft).

For more information, Gavrysh listed many available resources:

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Get Up and Running with Modern Angular

    The Angular web-dev framework might seem an odd choice for a Microsoft-centric developer to consider, seeing as it's championed by arch-rival Google, but a closer look reveals many advantages.

  • VS Code Experiments Boost AI Copilot Functionality

    Devs can now customize code generation, enjoy enhanced Chat experiences and much more.

  • AdaBoost Binary Classification Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a C# program that illustrates using the AdaBoost algorithm to perform binary classification for spam detection. Compared to other classification algorithms, AdaBoost is powerful and works well with small datasets, but is sometimes susceptible to model overfitting.

  • From Core to Containers to Orchestration: Modernizing Your Azure Compute

    The cloud changed IT forever. And then containers changed the cloud. And then Kubernetes changed containers. And then microservices usurped monoliths, and so it goes in the cloudscape. Here's help to sort it all out.

Subscribe on YouTube