Re: Windows 10 Assistant Tool
Kian Trip
New versions of .NET are released throughout the year, with a major release once a year. The .NET Upgrade Assistant helps you upgrade apps from previous versions of .NET, .NET Core, and .NET Framework to the latest version.
A good choice for complicated web apps. Upgrading from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core requires quite a bit of work and at times manual refactoring. This mode puts a .NET project next to your existing .NET Framework project, and routes endpoints that are implemented in the .NET project, while all other calls are sent to .NET Framework application.
Once your app has been upgraded, a status screen is displayed which shows all of the artifacts related to your project that were associated with the upgrade. Each upgrade artifact can be expanded to read more information about the status. The following list describes the status icons:
After you've installed the .NET Upgrade Assistant CLI tool, open a terminal window and navigate to the directory that contains the project you want to upgrade. You can use the upgrade-assistant --help command to see the available options the CLI provides.
Run the tool with the upgrade-assistant upgrade command, all of the projects from the current folder and below, are listed. The CLI tool provides an interactive way of choosing which project to upgrade. Use the arrow keys to select an item, and press Enter to run the item. Select the project you want to upgrade. In the example provided by this article, there are four projects under the current folder:
This blog post discusses benefits of using AWS Elastic Beanstalk as a business application modernization tool, and walks you through how to use the new Windows Web Application Migration Assistant. Businesses and organizations in all types of industries are migrating their workloads to the Cloud in ever-increasing numbers. Among migrated workloads, websites hosted on Internet Information Services (IIS) on Windows Server is a common pattern. Developers and IT teams that manage these workloads want their web applications to scale seamlessly based on continuously changing load, without having to guess or forecast future demand. They want their infrastructure, including the IIS server and Windows Server operating system, to automatically receive latest patches and updates, and remain compliant with their baseline policies without having to spend lots of manual effort or heavily invest in expensive commercial products. Additionally, many businesses want to tap into the global infrastructure, security, and resiliency offered by the AWS Cloud.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is designed to address these requirements. Elastic Beanstalk enables you to focus on your application code as it handles provisioning, maintenance, health-check, autoscaling, and other common tasks necessary to keep your application running. Now, the Windows Web Application Migration Assistant makes it easier than ever to migrate ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core web applications from IIS on Windows servers running on-premises or in another cloud to Elastic Beanstalk. This blog post discusses how you can use this open-source tool to automate your migration efforts and expedite your first step into the AWS Cloud.
The Windows Web Application Migration Assistant is an interactive PowerShell script that migrates entire websites and their configurations to Elastic Beanstalk. The migration assistant is available as an open-source project on GitHub, and can migrate entire ASP.NET applications running on .NET Framework in Windows, as well as on ASP.NET Core. Elastic Beanstalk also runs ASP.NET Core applications on Windows platform. For ASP.NET applications, you can use this tool to migrate both classic Web Forms applications, as well as ASP.NET MVC apps.
4- Generate: The script generates an Elastic Beanstalk deployment bundle. This bundle includes web application binaries and instructions for Elastic Beanstalk on how it should host the application.
The most high-level concept in Elastic Beanstalk is application. An Elastic Beanstalk application is a logical collection of lower-level components, such as environments and versions. For example, you might have an Elastic Beanstalk application called MarketingApp, which contains two Elastic Beanstalk environments: Test and Production. Each one of these environments can host one of the different versions of your application, as shown in the following diagram.
The Windows Web Application Migration Assistant allows you to migrate your database(s) during or after migration of web applications. In either case, your migrated web applications should be modified to point any connection strings to the new database endpoints. The migration assistant script also helps you to modify connection strings.
You need to have an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user in your destination AWS account. Follow the instructions to create a new IAM user. Your user needs credentials for both the AWS Console and programmatic access, so remember to check both boxes, as shown in the following screenshot.
The parameter profile_name is an arbitrary name to label these credentials. The optional parameter path_to_the_new_profile_file can be used to store the encrypted credentials profile in a customized path.
The migration assistant is a PowerShell script. Open a PowerShell window as administrator in your web server and run the MigrateIISWebsiteToElasticBeanstalk.ps1 script. Assuming you have copied the content of the GitHub package to your C: drive, launching the script looks as follows:
Having acquired access credentials, the assistant script then prompts you to enter an AWS Region. Enter the identifier of the AWS Region in which you want your migrated web application to run. If you are not sure which values can be used, check the list of available Regions using following cmdlet (in another PowerShell window):
After specifying the Region, the migration assistant script starts scanning your web server for deployed web applications. You can then choose one of the discovered web applications by entering its application number as shown in the list.
Once you enter the number of the web application that has to migrate, the assistant takes a snapshot of your environment and lists any connection strings used by your application. To update a connection string, enter its number. Optionally, you could choose Enter to skip this step, but remember to manually update connection strings, if any, before bringing the web application online.
The assistant then prompts you to update any connection strings selected above. If you choose M, you can update the string manually by editing it in the file path provided by the migration assistant. Otherwise, paste the contents of the new connection string and choose Enter.
By default, the migration assistant automatically creates an environment with a name prefixed with MigrationRun. It also creates a package containing your web application files. This package is called application source bundle. The migration assistant uploads this source bundle as a version inside the Elastic Beanstalk application.
Elastic Beanstalk automatically provisions an Amazon EC2 instance to host your web application. The default Amazon EC2 instance type is t3.medium. When the migration assistant prompts you to enter the instance type, you can choose Enter to accept the default size, or you can enter any other Amazon EC2 Instance Type.
The Windows Web Application Migration Assistant uses all the default values to quickly create a new Elastic Beanstalk application. However, you might want to change some of these default values to address your more specific requirements. For example, you may need to deploy your web application inside an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), set up advanced health monitoring, or enable managed updates features.
Also keep in mind that Elastic Beanstalk supports a maximum of one HTTP and one HTTPS endpoint. No matter what port numbers are used for these endpoints within the on-premises IIS, Elastic Beanstalk will bind them to ports 80 and 433 respectively.
If you use the steps described in this post to test the migration assistant, it creates resources in your AWS account. You keep getting charged for these resources if they go beyond the free tier limit. To avoid that, you can delete resources to stop being billed for them. This is as easy as going to the Elastic Beanstalk console and deleting any applications that you no longer want.
Now you can upgrade any .NET application to the latest version of .NET inside of Visual Studio! We are happy to introduce it as a Visual Studio extension and will upgrade your .NET Framework or .NET Core web- and desktop apps. Some project types are in development and coming soon, see the details below.
Between those two, .NET 6 has longer support time and .NET 7 is the latest, so has newer features. We release a new version of .NET every year in November and every even version number is supported for 3 years (Long Term Support, or LTS for short). So, you can either stay on the latest cutting-edge tech and upgrade every year, or switch from LTS to LTS once every 2-3 years.
Upgrading your application, especially from .NET Framework, was a complicated process. We kept prototyping and improving in this area to simplify your upgrades. In the past, you might have used the Upgrade Assistant CLI tool or Microsoft Project Migrations. We have collected your feedback, big thanks to everyone who filled in our survey or left us comments, created issues and feature requests! To address your feedback, we concluded that we needed to provide a unified upgrade experience for every project type inside of Visual Studio.
We have a goal to support every .NET project type. Also, we think of this tool not just as a one-time upgrade from .NET Framework to .NET 6/7, but as the way to upgrade your application to the latest .NET in the future as well. Besides changing the target framework version, the tool will be able to modify your code to fix breaking changes. These are our plans for the future, and currently here is what the tool supports in the latest version:
d3342ee215