Microsoft is continuously putting efforts to improvise its ASP.NET technology stack, allowing ASP.NET developers to build highly secure and modern ASP.NET applications that empower businesses to fulfill ever-changing customers’ requirements and expectations.
With the release of .NET 5- a unified platform and extension of .NET Core series, the popularity of .Net Core has further increased and looks like it is the future.
There is no iota of doubt that the latest version of .NET Framework is making the ASP.NET market sensational in 2021.
Based on 2019 Stack Overflow survey, .NET Core took first spot in the category “Favorite Framework, Libraries, and Tools with 77.2%
Source: StackOverflow
Businesses that have existing ASP.NET applications can migrate to ASP.NET Core to take advantage of the modern power-packed features.
In this post, we will discuss what businesses will get with the migration of existing ASP.NET applications to ASP.NET Core and how to migrate from ASP.NET MVC to ASP.Net Core.
➤ Why Migrate Your Existing Applications to ASP.NET Core?
ASP.NET Core offers a wide array of advantages over ASP.NET MVC Framework from productivity to performance. Let’s talk about the advantages you will gain from .NET Core.
♦ Improved Performance & Scalability of Your Applications
You can enhance the performance level of your application by migrating the existing application to ASP.NET Core. It follows best practices such as caching aggressively, minimizing HTTP requests, minimizing large object allocations, optimizing data access, and many more.
♦ Get Enhanced Security for your Application
In the digital era, security is one of the major concerns for any business to run online. Any unauthorized access to business-critical data will cost any business a massive amount.
By migrating your existing enterprise application to ASP.NET Core, you can make your business applications highly secure. With ASP.NET Core, you can have an eye on various security parameters including authentication, authorization, data protection, XSRF/CSRF prevention, and HTTPS enforcement.
♦ Applications Built on ASP.NET Core are Compatible with Multiple OS
ASP.NET Core is an open-source and cross-platform framework. By migrating your enterprise application to ASP.NET Core, your business applications can run on multiple OS – Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
♦ Easy Application Deployment
ASP.NET Core offers a framework-dependent deployment model and a self-contained deployment model to deploy enterprise applications. This helps in deploying ASP.NET applications easily.
♦ Supports Lightweight Editors & CLI Tools
.NET Core supports lightweight editors and command-line tools (CLI) for all supported platforms.
Visual Studio Code provides an outstanding code editing experience to developers who want a lightweight editing experience in conjunction with the .NET Core CLI. Visual Studio Code is our lightweight cross-platform editor with source control and debugging support built in. By using a .NET CLI with Visual Studio Code, you can develop .NET applications that can run on any platform you pick.
♦ Razor Pages – Building & Maintaining a Web Application is Quick & Effortless
ASP.NET Core has a Razor Pages module, a page-based coding module that enables .NET developers to build dynamic, data-driven web applications seamlessly and efficiently.
In the ASP.NET MVC framework, .NET developers need to juggle a lot with various controller classes which consist of many actions. As new stuff gets added each time, the classes grow bigger. This makes the applications based on MVC too complex.
Whereas in ASP.NET Core Razor Pages, each page of an application is self-contained with its own view and code organized together. This makes it a well-organized framework.
♦ Supports Cloud Services
Cloud computing is one of the amazing technologies that can grow businesses of all sizes cost-effectively. With cloud-based applications, you can make use of IT resources as per your business’s ever-changing requirements.
ASP.NET Core supports Azure cloud services. You can leverage the Azure cloud with the help of Azure App Service Migration Assistant to shift your business to the cloud.
➤ Tools to Ease the Porting of Existing Applications to .NET Core
We have listed some helpful tools that will help you to port an application from ASP.NET MVC to ASP.NET Core.
♦ .NET Upgrade Assistant
The .NET Upgrade Assistant is a command-line tool (CLI tool) that operates on a wide array of ASP.NET Framework apps such as ASP.NET MVC apps .NET Framework Windows Forms apps, .NET Framework console apps and so on. The CLI tool includes the installation of analyzers that can help in the migration process.
♦ .NET Portability Analyzer
The .NET Portability Analyzer is an analysis and reporting tool that deeply analyzes different assemblies and creates a comprehensive report on .NET APIs that are not present for the existing applications or libraries to be portable on your .NET Core.
♦ Platform compatibility analyzer
The Platform compatibility analyzer is a tool that checks for compatibility. It analyzes whether the API that you are currently using will throw an error” PlatformNotSupportedException” at run time or not.
➤ Key Pointers to Consider While Migrating from ASP.NET MVC to ASP.NET Core
♦ Get Ready with the Latest Version of Toolkit
Before migrating your application to ASP.Net Core, the foremost thing is to upgrade Visual Studio 2017 to version 15.3 or later to the latest version of .NET Core SDK.
♦ Check for NuGet Package Compatibility
In case you implement NuGet packages in your .NET project, first verify whether the packages are compatible with ASP.NET Core or not. In order to check the compatibility, you can make use of NuGetPackageExplorer tool.
♦ Update Namespace
While migrating an application from ASP.NET MVC to ASP.NET Core, remove all System.Web namespaces and replace them with Microsoft.AspNetCore.
♦ Migrate HTTP handlers and HttpModules to Middleware
HTTP modules and HTTP handlers are the imperative components of the ASP.NET architecture. These components are quite similar to the Middleware component in ASP.NET Core.
HTTP handler is a pre-processor component that is executed for giving a response to a request made to your application. HTTP modules are also a pre-processor component that checks the incoming requests made and takes appropriate action as per the request.
If your ASP.NET MVC application is using custom HTTP modules or HTTP handlers, you should migrate them to ASP.NET Core. It can be done using middleware. It can be configured fully in the Configure method of an application, or implemented in a separate class.
ASP.NET Core middleware are software components that are put together into an application pipeline to manage requests and responses.
♦ Use Built-in Dependency injection
Dependency injection (DI) is one of the important features to consider when designing an application on ASP.NET Core. It is a design pattern in which a class or object has its dependent classes injected. By using this feature, you can build loosely-coupled applications that are more testable, modular, and easily maintainable.
If your ASP.NET MVC application is not using DI, you will have to look for built-in support for DI in ASP.NET Core.
ASP.NET Core apps by default use DI. It is needed to provide support for framework features into your ASP.NET Core applications.
♦ Migrate Configuration to ASP.NET Core
Configuration of an ASP.NET MVC application makes use of the built-in .NET configuration files, web.config in the app folder, and machine.config on the server. The majority of ASP.NET MVC apps put their settings in the configuration file’s appSettings or connectionStrings elements.
Unlike ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Core apps will store the configuration values in a JSON-formatted file, such as appsettings.json.
For migrating to .NET Core, first figure out all the configuration settings that are part of the application.
Once you have identified all the configuration settings, thereafter identify where these settings are used and how they are implemented in the app itself. And make sure to remove any unused settings. This will help you to ease the load of the configuration migration process.
♦ Migrate Authentication and Identity to ASP.NET Core
In this step, you will migrate the registration, login, and user management features of your application.
In ASP.NET MVC, authentication and identity features are configured in two files named Startup.Auth.cs and IdentityConfig.cs, under the AppStart folder. While in ASP.NET Core, these authentication & identity features are configured in Startup.cs file.
For that you need to Install the below following NuGet packages:
Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.EntityFrameworkCore Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.Cookies Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer
♦ Porting Static files to wwwroot
The static content in ASP.NET MVC was hosted from the web project’s root directory. While in ASP.NET Core, these static contents are kept within the project’s web root directory. By default, it is wwwroot.
♦ Migrate the layout files
Layouts files in ASP.NET MVC provide a look and feel on all the pages of your application. Make sure you have migrated the layout files to ASP.NET Core.
For more technical stuff, you can refer to the ASP.NET Core migration documentation by Microsoft.
➤ Closing Words
So, you must be thinking about whether there is any urgency in migrating to ASP.NET Core or if the migration is optional. Well, there is no immediate rush to move to .NET Core. But with the release of the .NET 5 unified platform, .NET Core is the future.
However, if the functionalities of your application are working fine and stable with the legacy technology stack, then no need to forcefully migrate to the advanced technology stack. Nevertheless, if the .NET Core migration is imperative to meet your business goals, then hire a well-experienced and trusted ASP.NET developer to move your application to the latest one gradually.
