Microsoft recently announced a new version of .NET Upgrade Assistant in Visual Studio. This release adds support for new scenarios for different platforms and frameworks, and includes enhancements such as support for .NET 8, upgrades from Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI, and upgrades for Azure Functions.

This version also brings multiple other enhancements, including improvements to the way that Upgrade Assistant updates NuGet packages, upgraded Incremental scenario to use YARP 2.0, and improved error handling that shows all failures and warnings in the Progress View for each project component. 

According to Microsoft, in the last version of Upgrade Assistant, when the user chose to upgrade from .NET Core or later to .NET 6, 7, or 8, only the target framework was upgraded. With this release, however, all packages the application is referencing will be upgraded to a set of packages that correspond to the target .NET.

Users can also upgrade existing Xamarin.Forms applications to .NET MAUI, Xamarin’s successor, offering several new benefits and improvements such as single project to simplify asset management; NuGet management; and leverage multi-targeting.

Additionally, this upgrade brings multi-window support for desktop and table scenarios, a rebuilt layout geared at improving maintainability and performance, App Builder to standardize app bootstrapping with common .NET pattern, and a decoupled platform from  cross-platform controls.

There have also been upgrades made to Azure Functions. The company stated that when Azure Functions are upgraded to the latest .NET, the tool will also upgrade the user’s version of Azure Functions to the latest version (v4). The body of functions has also been updated to use the new APIs.

To learn more, read the blog post