AWS Open Sources More Parts of Its Porting Assistance for.NET Tool from Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now available to the open-source community. The Porting assistant for.NET tool, which was created to assist users in porting their old.NET Framework apps to the new.NET Core framework. AWS launched Porting Assistant.NET this summer to help users analyze older apps and estimate the effort required to port them to.NET Core. This tool will soon be part of the unifying.NET 5. Although it does assist with the porting process it doesn’t do any code conversion. AWS stated that the tool is different from other.NET Framework to-.NET Core tools on the market (including one from Microsoft). This is due to its ability to assess the entire tree of package dependencies, as well as common functionality like detecting incompatible APIs. AWS claims that it uses solution files for the starting point, making it easier to assess monolithic solutions with many projects. This eliminates the need to analyze and aggregate information about individual binaries. AWS stated in a blog post that the Porting Assistant for.NET analyzes NuGet packages dependencies and API usage within.NET Framework applications at a solution level. The assistant helps with the porting process by removing the manual effort required to convert project files to a new.NET Core format. It also assists in upgrading NuGet packages when there are compatible replacements. AWS has now contributed the source code as well as compatibility analysis components to the assistant, which it had already open-sourced. The company stated that it is open sourcing the components to encourage community users and to share porting best practices with recommendations, and further collaborate on the project via reviews and comments via GitHub issues. The three components are now available under the Apache 2.0 license.

• Porting Assistant for.NET Client: Back-end assessment APIs, project porting code, and back-end assessment APIs to make it easier to interface with the assistant from an application’s source code. It’s here.
• Codelyzer: This is the source code analyzer used in the assessment APIs. It can be found here.
• Porting Assistant for.NET Datastore – The original repository containing data sets used in compatibility assessments, as well as a new Recommendations Folder for contributing to the NuGet or API replacement data. It can be found here.

AWS stated that they are excited about the Porting assistant for.NET and the positive response from the.NET community. “As you know, we will be maintaining a roadmap within the repositories. The future direction of the assistant includes IDE integrations, a command line interface, and improved support to scan source code repositories (public or private). “We are aware that porting.NET applications is a broad topic and that a community-based approach is necessary to tackle it. We plan to continue to work on extensibility, such as allowing users to add logic to expand the analysis. The team welcomes all feedback and contributions in these areas and more and looks forward to further collaboration with the community.