How to Update 70 Projects to .Net 4.8 With Ease?

In this spring cleaning we had to update our last application to .Net 4.8. Unfortunately, the project is rather big:

The solution has 70 projects.

The good news was that the projects are on .Net 4.7.2 and there are no breaking changes. Still, updating 70 projects by hand is nothing I look forward to. Luckily for us, there is a Visual Studio extension called Target Framework Migrator (GitHub, Visual Studio Marketplace) that helps with this task.

After installing the extension and restarting Visual Studio, you find it in the Tools menu:

Go to Tools / Target Framework Migrator to run it

We can select the projects we want to upgrade and choose the target version:

Our projects are on .Net 4.7.2 before we update them

After we hit Migrate, we have time to drink a coffee:

70 projects take their time and we see a lot of the running dialog

The Target Framework Migrator took around 10 minutes and then all projects where on .Net 4.8:

After the update everything is on.Net 4.8

Conclusion

Target Framework Migrator is a great help when you need to migrate from one version to another in the .Net full framework. Updating 70 projects without a problem was a well-received surprise. I hope they follow along with their roadmap and support .NET Core and .NET Standard projects soon.