Recently while watching various Microsoft BUILD 2025 sessions, I came across this one regarding using GitHub Copilot AI Agents to perform .NET Upgrades: Using agentic AI to simplify .NET upgrades with GitHub Copilot. I figured this was worth a try on my QUID WebAPI and Web App. I was rather impressed.
General Steps
Here are the general steps. Keep in mind, this is for simplified upgrades, not for something like upgrading from .NET Framework to .NET Core. They're not quite there yet.
- Ensure you have Visual Studio 17.14.
- Install the GitHub Copilot app modernization - upgrade for .NET here
- Bring up GitHub CoPilot chat pane
- In that window, select "Agent" to turn on agent mode.
- In the tool selector, choose the "Upgrade" (and "upgrade_start") tool to begin.
- In the chat window, enter: "Upgrade my solution to .NET 9"
- Throughout the process, it will prompt you with questions. Just answer them in the chat window. Sometimes I just had to say "Continue"
- It brought up a summary of what it was going to do, and let me review it. I then just needed to say "Continue". Some of These steps included
- Upgrade to .NET 9 on each project,
- The necessary NuGet upgrades
- Converting project files to SDK-style on one project that was previously .NET Framework 4.7.2
- I then just needed to type "Proceed"
- I had a few compilation errors come up and required "manual intervention". It asked me to address those and let it know when to continue. I had to reply with "I fixed the errors. Please continue" a few times.
Eventually it finished, and did a great job. It built and ran locally just fine.
Deployment Issues! Enter ChatGPT
I then jumped on Azure Dev Ops in order to deploy this, and one of my pipelines was giving me an error. I wasn't sure exactly where how to fix it. Through some careful prompt engineering I was able to ask my question properly in ChatGPT. I was impressed at how well it helped me.
I can't help but chuckle a bit at this BLOG post. This is my first time posting about AI assisted software development. It has quite a "new" feel to right now. However many years from know it will be such a norm, it will sound like someone BLOGGING about writing an email, or texting for the first time. We might even stop saying: "I used AI!"
