Windows Desktop Application Modernization Guidance

This repo contains information to help you modernize your .NET desktop applications. We are prioriizing the following high level topics to document and provide samples, but feel free to suggest new topics in our issues section.

Porting WPF and WinForms apps to .NET Core 3

Samples, options, tips and tricks to convert WPF and WinForms projects based on .NET Framework to .NET Core 3.

• How to: Port a Windows Forms desktop app to .NET Core
• How to: Port a WPF desktop app to .NET Core

Using Windows 10 features in WPF and WinForms apps

Windows 10 include a number of APIs that are accessible from Windows 10 SDKs. You can use these APIs in .NET apps by using the Microsoft.Windows.SDK.Contracts NuGet package. More information

Data Access

ADO.NET can be used in .NET Core 3 applications, however not all data source providers are available.

We have plans to support Entity Framework 6 in .NET Core, and Entity Framework Core is already supported.

Other non-relational data stores (such as CosmosDB) are also available to .NET Core.

Connecting to Services

WCF has been partially ported to .NET Core 3; however, there is no support for WCF server. WCF clients features are documented here. Additional services that support .NET Core will be included as well.

Deployment

.NET Desktop applications can be deployed with MSIX. To create MSIX packages you can use the Windows Application Packaging Project available in Visual Studio 2019.

Note: To package .NET Core 3 applications you must use Visual Studio 2019 Update 1 Preview or later.

Known issues

• AppDomains
• Remoting
• WCF Server
• WCF Client supported features
• Non-String Resources

Samples

• BeanTraders
• WPF Concepts
• Memory Game