We’ve built a new course to help you navigate the journey when you’re the owner of an application built on a legacy .NET framework and it needs to be modernized. The whole concept of modernization is overwhelming! Security updates aren’t being issued any longer! Dependencies are out of date because they’re not being updated! You’re not alone. We have a suite of tools to help you modernize and this course helps you use those tools. We’ve built the GitHub Copilot modernization tooling to help you modernize your .NET code. And we wanted to create a course to help you use the tools so we created the .NET Modernization for Beginners course.
This is a free, open-source, hands-on course that walks you through modernizing a real legacy ASP.NET application all the way to .NET 10, using the GitHub Copilot modernization agent. The course walks you through the modernization journey step-by-step. Along the way you’ll learn how the tooling produces assessments and plans before it changes any code and how you can modify those to tell the coding agent exactly what needs to happen.
Why a hands-on course?
There’s no better way to learn than by doing. And in this course you’re not just going to read about the GitHub Copilot modernization and some theory, but the course will give you exercises to do it too. (You will need a GitHub Copilot subscription.)
GitHub Copilot modernization works differently from agentic development tools you may have tried before. It does not just rewrite your code behind the scenes and hand you back something you have to reverse-engineer. It produces transparent, editable artifacts that you can read, question, and adjust: an assessment.md, a plan.md, and a tasks.md. Those files become your guide and your source of truth. You review them, you shape them, and only then does the work begin. The agent assists you, but you make the calls.
The four chapters
The course is organized in the same way you’d approach a modernization journey. Each chapter builds on the last, and each one teaches you not just what to do, but why you are doing it.
Chapter 1 – Assessment
You start by pointing the modernization agent at a legacy solution and letting it analyze what is really there. You explore the generated assessment.md to understand the risks, the dependencies, and the level of effort involved, so you begin from facts instead of guesses.
Chapter 2 – Planning
Next you turn those insights into a plan. The agent produces a plan.md with recommended target frameworks, a sequence of upgrade steps, and an effort estimate. You learn how to review it, customize it for your context, and finalize a plan you actually believe in.
Chapter 3 – Upgrade & Execution
This is where the agentic development happens. The agent executes the plan while you track progress in tasks.md, moving the application forward iteratively. You will see it do the heavy lifting while you stay in the driver’s seat and make the decisions that matter.
Chapter 4 – Cloud with Azure
Modernization is not finished until your app is running where it belongs. In the final chapter you publish the modernized application to Azure App Service and look at the next steps for operating and evolving it, so the journey ends with something live, not just something that compiles.
Get started
You can be up and running in just a few minutes.
- Make sure you have Visual Studio 2022 (17.10 or later) or Visual Studio 2026 with a GitHub Copilot subscription.
- Clone the repository from github.com/microsoft/dotnet-modernization-for-beginners.
- Begin with Chapter 0 (Introduction).
Everything you need is in the repo, including step-by-step written instructions and companion videos for each chapter.
We’re not creating this in a vacuum and we want to hear from you. Open some issues to suggest improvements, request new chapters, or report problems. Feel free to submit PRs if you want too! And don’t forget to star the repo if you find it useful!
Legacy code does not have to be overwhelming. Grab the repo, open Visual Studio, and let us modernize .NET together, one application at a time.
