AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring is a Visual Studio extension that reduces the time and effort required for developers to refactor legacy .NET applications to cloud-based alternatives on AWS. It assesses the application source code to recommend possible modernization pathways, such as porting to .NET Core, identifying Windows-specific IIS and Active Directory dependency configurations, performing code modifications where possible to enable Linux compatibility, and helping validate the refactored application on AWS services - all without leaving Visual Studio IDE.

AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring supports Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2022.

AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring supports .NET Core 3.1, .NET 5, and .NET 6 as a target, and .NET Framework 3.5+ as a source.

The AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring extension supports ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, WCF, and web application types for assessment and porting. Any .NET applications listening on a TCP connection can be deployed on AWS through the test deployment capabilities of the toolkit.

The AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring extension enables you to run your application on Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) through AWS Fargate.

Porting Assistant for .NET is an open-source analysis tool built by AWS to help assess the compatibility of .NET Framework applications with cross-platform .NET on Linux, with no dependency on AWS. The AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring provides a unified tooling that aims to simplify the end-to-end refactoring workflow. It includes the functionality of Porting Assistant for .NET and adds new features, such as testing on AWS containers. Our vision is that the AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring will continue to evolve and grow, becoming the hub for .NET modernization and migration on AWS.

You should use Porting Assistant for .NET if you want to use an open-source tool to evaluate the scope of a .NET modernization effort, visualize dependencies within a solution, and perform an assisted port of .NET Framework to .NET. You should use the AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring extension if you have chosen to modernize and migrate your .NET Framework applications to AWS, if you are evaluating AWS as a target for modernization and migration, or if you want to learn about running modernized .NET applications on the AWS Cloud. In essence, the new extension includes the functionality of Porting Assistant for .NET and adds new features, such as testing on AWS containers.