.Net

Converting .Net Standard Libraries to .Net Core

Tim Brown May 20, 2020

I was looking for a quick answer to this on the internet and couldn’t find it. So here it is

Open your .Net Standard csproj file in notepad or similar text editor. You’ll see this structure

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
<PropertyGroup>
<TargetFramework>netstandard2.0</TargetFramework>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<ProjectReference Include="..\..\..\Framework\AnotherLibrary.csproj" />
</ItemGroup>
</Project>

Change the target framework to the desired version of core

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
<PropertyGroup>
<TargetFramework>netcoreapp3.1</TargetFramework>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<ProjectReference Include="..\..\..\Framework\AnotherLibrary.csproj" />
</ItemGroup>
</Project>

Save it
Reload the project in visual studio or other IDE
Done

(I know there will be all kinds of other complexities to this but I’ve just got a bunch of standard libraries that need to reference a core project and can’t. So, they all need a rapid upgrade to .Net Core – like so).