Upgrade ASP.NET Web API to ASP.NET Core MVC
In Development
We are working on support for migrating ASP.NET WebAPI applications to ASP.NET Core MVC.
Like our WCF to gRPC support, the generated code will follow best practices, including OpenAPI for documenting APIs and generating client code for multiple platforms and languages. Again, no proprietary packages or runtime dependencies will be added; once you’ve ReCoded your application, it’s all yours.
Why You Need To Upgrade
The most recent version of .NET platform is .NET 6, built off of .NET Core. While some .NET Framework technologies were ported over, WCF was not one of them, and there are no plans to change that. This means developers who continue to use WCF are stuck using a version of .NET that is no longer being innovated. Using the best version of .NET possible requires a switch.
Even if it were, it would not be the right solution for modern API development.
WCF was originally released as part of .NET Framework 3.0 at the end of 2006. The world of distributed systems was very different then: JSON was barely a thing, and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) using XML-serialized SOAP messages was the prevailing standard for Service Oriented Architectures. The term “microservices” would not be coined for another five years. And technology moves forward ever-faster, so in the years since WCF was conceived, people have come up with better solutions to the problems it sought to solve.
Where does that leave you and many others that have a deep investment in WCF for building your critical applications?
ReCode from ASP.NET Web API 2 to ASP.NET Core MVC
Visual ReCode will guide you through creating a new ASP.NET Core 3.1 Web API Project and then
automatically copy and rewrite your existing API ApiController types to ASP.NET Core Controller types.
The new controllers will be updated to use ASP.NET Core’s ActionResult<T> with mapping for HttpResponseException
errors.
Of course, just converting the controllers doesn’t cover all your application does - so ReCode will also
identify and copy dependencies from your .NET Framework project(s) to .NET Core 3.1 project(s).
You can choose how to map from your old projects to the new .NET Core projects to optimize how you
want your final application code structure to be.
Add OpenAPI metadata
Modern HTTP APIs should be documented using the OpenAPI (formerly known as “Swagger”) standard, which provides interactive documentation of your APIs in the browser and supports client code generation across multiple platforms. Visual ReCode can automatically add the necessary code to support OpenAPI as it migrates your ASP.NET WebAPI 2 application to ASP.NET Core MVC.
Fast, Native Implementation
Visual ReCode works by moving your source code from a .NET Framework project to a new .NET Core project and rewriting it as a native ASP.NET Core MVC. It doesn’t add any proprietary third party libraries - instead it creates the same code you would make yourself, with no Visual ReCode runtime components.