Lessons from Microsoft’s Internal .NET Upgrade

• Microsoft’s discussions of internal application upgrades from the .NET Framework to .NET could help customers understand the benefits and hurdles of migration.
• Access to product teams and business incentives made Microsoft’s migrations easier than they would be for most customers.

Two groups in Microsoft have published discussions of their migrations of internal applications from the older .NET Framework development and runtime technology to the unified, cross-platform .NET offering. The discussions describe some of the processes, findings, and benefits of the migrations. (For items not covered in Microsoft’s discussions, see the sidebar “.NET Migration Data That Would Be Good to Know.”)

Benefits of Migrating from the .NET Framework to .NET

.NET delivers class libraries (sets of development APIs) and a runtime environment required by so-called managed code applications implemented in programming languages such as C#. It is a cross-platform revision and essentially a replacement of the older .NET Framework, which remains supported. .NET 6 is a Long Term Support release that will be supported until Nov. 2024, and .NET 7 is a Standard Term Support release that will be supported until May 2024.