.NET Core 2.0 comes with lots of improvements, and this is the primary reason people wanted to migrate their existing .NET Core applications from 1.x to 2.0. However, there is a checklist which we will go through in this topic to ensure smooth migration.

First of all, install the .NET Core 2.0 SDK on your machine. It will install the latest assemblies to your machine, which will help you to execute further steps.

This is the most important step, and this is where the different versions need to be upgraded in the .NET Core project file. Since we know that, with the .csproj type, we don't have project.json, to modify the framework and other dependencies, we can edit the existing project using any Visual Studio editor and modify the XML.

The XML Node that needs to be changed is the TargetFramework. For .NET Core 2.0, we have to change the TargetFramework moniker to netcoreapp2.0, which is shown as follows:

<TargetFramework>netcoreapp2.0</TargetFramework>

Next, you can start building the project which will upgrade the .NET Core dependencies to 2.0. However, there is a chance of a few of them still referencing the older version, and upgrading those dependencies needs to be done explicitly using NuGet package manager.

If you have global.json added to your project, you have to update the SDK version to 2.0.0, which is shown as follows:

{ 
  "sdk": { 
    "version": "2.0.0" 
  } 
} 

.NET Core CLI is also an important section in your .NET Core project file. When migrating, you have to upgrade the version of DotNetCliToolReference to 2.0.0, which is shown as follows:

<ItemGroup> 
  <DotNetCliToolReference Include=
  "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.CodeGeneration.Tools" Version="2.0.0" /> 
</ItemGroup> 

There might be more tools added depending on whether you are using Entity Framework Core, User Secrets, and others. You have to update their versions.

There have been some more improvements and changes to the ASP.NET Core Identity model. Some of the classes are renamed and you can find them at: http://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/migration.