Microsoft has enhanced its .NET Upgrade Assistant, a tool that helps developers upgrade from the .NET Framework to .NET 8 or between .NET Core versions, with code assessment features.

The .NET Upgrade Assistant is available as a Visual Studio extension or as a command-line tool, now includes a code assessment tool that scans your solution at the source code level, Microsoft said in a bulletin on June 25. The code assessment identifies potential issues and dependencies that could pose a challenge during the upgrade process.

A dashboard presents an overview of issues across the entire solution, categorizes issues by severity, and provides an estimate of the effort required to remediate each issue. Issues can provide exact locations within source code where issues were detected, making it easier to troubleshoot and fix dependencies. Developers can jump to a line that requires attention, address issues, and mark them as fixed. Links to documentation, best practices, and community discussions also are provided.

Developers who install the Visual Studio extension, can analyze applications within the IDE. Users of the command-line tool can open a terminal window and navigate to the directory that contains a project sought for analysis. Both the command-line tool and the Visual Studio extension enable developers to save results of an analysis in various formats, so the report can be shared with others.