8 Things to Prepare for a .NET Core Upgrade
- Nikki Dent
- July 29, 2020
As Microsoft begins to deprecate the .NET Framework and move their innovation to .NET Core, it might be the right time for your business to upgrade your applications to .NET Core. While the migration will likely require you to redo much of the “plumbing” of your application, the results of the move are overwhelmingly positive—faster speeds, improved performance, and more affordable deployment options.
Aptera team members have been working with clients to port several applications over to .NET Core and shared with us what they learned along the way. If you’ve found the right time to begin your migration to .NET Core, we’re sharing 8 factors to prepare for before you begin your migration to help it go more smoothly.
8 Factors to Prepare Before Migrating to .NET Core

1. Set Expectations Around Timeline
2. Capture “Before” Metrics
3. Know How You’ll Track Work
4. Verify that Third-Party Libraries Support .NET Core

5. Prepare to Upgrade Security
The move to .NET Core is a great opportunity to take care of technical debt surrounding security, so be sure to bring members of your security team onto the migration project. It’s important to not throw your app over the fence to security when you’re finished, but rather to have cross-team cooperation with them. Security specialists will be able to speak to implications that developers need to know.
Additionally, .NET Core has a different framework deploy model for vulnerability upgrades. In other frameworks, you could deploy once per system. Now, you need to update your SDKs and rebuild your app and redeploy if there is a vulnerability. You’ll want to make sure all of your developers are trained on new security update procedures.
6. Plan the Workflow for Database Conversion and Coding Migration
7. Plan Updates to CI/CD Pipeline
8. Know Your Testing Plan
Since there is potential for small dependencies to not work with .NET Core or when other aspects of the system need to be rewritten, you’ll likely need to do full regression testing on your product. Therefore, it’s important to have a living test plan—know where you are headed but leave it open so as you learn more into the process you can adjust your focus and add details.
One of our teams saw a lot of success by including the rest of the team, beyond just the QA manual tester, in the process. This way the developers and business analysts could help keep the QA testers aware of any additional variation cases that they might come across. Collaborative testing with the team is also beneficial because it gives everyone safety and visibility into the testing process.
Conclusions
A lot of these points discuss upgrades to other components of your product, but don’t feel like you need to upgrade everything during this process. Assess what makes sense to be upgraded right now for your business.
We hope that calling out these tips will help you to think through your migration to .NET Core before you start and hopefully save you a few headaches along the way. If you’d like help from a high-performing team for your .NET Core upgrade or to work on other aspects of your .NET application, let’s talk and see if an Aptera team would be a good fit.

Nikki Dent
Nikki is a technical copywriter for Aptera. With a bachelor’s degree in writing from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind., she has been honing her craft of marketing copywriting for the past seven years. In her role at Aptera, Nikki enjoys learning and writing about the technology and strategy at work across the company.