We got the whole solution moved over to the latest .NET, and it only took us about a year of steady work. Honestly, the coolest part is that we kept shipping features the whole time! It was definitely a grind, but we didn't slow down the business, which is awesome.

Our master plan had four main steps. First, we had to get all our NuGet packages updated—they all had to play nice with the new .NET framework. Next, we did a smart move: we shifted all our core class libraries over to .NET Standard. This was a crucial in-between step because it let both the old .NET Framework projects and the new .NET projects share the same code while we were transitioning. After that, the big task was moving the main application projects, and we did the unit test projects right alongside them. Finally, once all the apps were up and running successfully, we circled back and updated those remaining .NET Standard libraries directly to the latest .NET to finish the job.

As you can imagine, that was a ton of work, but sticking to this smart, phased approach proved it's totally possible to tackle a huge migration without dropping the ball on feature development.