Modernize .NET Apps with GitHub Copilot
TL;DR
Copilot turns .NET modernization into a visible workflow: The agent assesses a .NET Framework 4.8 MVC app, generates a plan, executes changes, validates results, and surfaces everything through markdown artifacts and a dashboard.
The demo targets .NET 10 and finishes in four tasks: After confirming options like automatic mode, commit-after-each-task, and an in-place rewrite, the upgrade runs through assessment, SDK-style conversion, package/API remediation, and final validation.
Assessment first is the key framing: Nika emphasizes that teams should not start modernization blindly, and shows a markdown assessment artifact listing dependencies, APIs, incompatibilities, and recommended fixes.
Teams can inject their own standards through custom skills: By adding files in the .github skills folder, organizations can supply their own rules or practices and have the modernization agent respect them during execution.
The new dashboard is positioned as a diagnostics view, not just automation magic: It shows commit timelines, file-level diffs, logs, compatibility breakdowns, and project-by-project progress so users can keep, undo, or inspect every change.
Microsoft is pushing this beyond single apps: Nika says the same experience is available in Visual Studio, VS Code, Copilot CLI, Copilot Cloud Agent, and the newly released Modernize CLI for batch assessments and execution across application portfolios.
The Breakdown
A .NET Framework 4.8 MVC app gets upgraded to .NET 10 in four agent-run tasks, with GitHub Copilot generating the assessment, plan, task list, commits, and validation logs as editable markdown the whole way. Nika DuMont's core pitch is that modernization stops feeling like a blind framework jump when the agent shows every blocker, lets teams choose strategies like in-place rewrite vs side-by-side, and keeps humans in control.
Was This Useful?
Share
Keep Reading
Make Alcreon Yours
Tune your feedFive quick questions, and the feed ranks what matters to you first.Or just get notified
The weekly Echo. Signal worth keeping in your inbox.
Every new piece, announced on X.
Read Next
See all
Playbook
Cheap Models, Hard Tasks
Most agent workflows route every step to the frontier model by default. The bill scales with how chatty the agent gets, even when most steps don't need that brain.
Playbook
Tasteful Skills
“Tasteful Skills” argues that the best agent skills are not documentation or best-practice lists.
Playbook
The Art of Tasteful Prompting
Learn how tasteful prompting helps you move beyond generic AI output by shaping context, style, and judgment from the start.