Stop Rewriting. Start with Aspire.

TL;DR

• 1

  500 files gone before the rewrite even started: Pine deletes the MVC 3 and MVC 4 directories first so the agent is not confused by contradictory legacy code and starts clean from the MVC 5 .NET Framework 4.8 version.

• 2

  Aspire's agent skills are the center of the workflow: Running aspire agent init installs skills like Aspire, deployment, monitoring, orchestration, Aspire-ify, and Playwright CLI so Copilot can query live docs and scaffold modernization work with context.

• 3

  The AI produced a full modernization plan before touching code: Using the Aspire-ify skill plus a long spec prompt, Copilot generated a phased plan that included EF Core data access, a dedicated migration worker, minimal APIs with DTOs, and an Astro TypeScript Tailwind front end.

• 4

  A working storefront appeared in 44 minutes, and the full run took about 1 hour 15 minutes: Autopilot handled front-end generation, API wiring, login flows, containers, Playwright-based verification, and other steps Pine says would otherwise be manual.

• 5

  The resulting architecture is a modern multi-service app, not a direct port: The finished app uses a C# Aspire app host to wire SQL Server, a music database, Keycloak OIDC, a migration service, an ASP.NET Core minimal API, and an Astro SSR storefront with dependency ordering via WithReference and WaitFor.

• 6

  Aspire bakes in observability and better local dev ergonomics: Pine shows the Aspire dashboard tracking resource health, logs, traces, migrations, and OpenTelemetry signals, plus a Scalar OpenAPI UI for the generated API.