Migrating a .NET Core project to the .csproj format

The dotnet 1.0.1 tooling includes a tool called dotnet-migrate.

Just run:

1$ dotnet migrate

More info here at the Microsoft Docs here.

But it dint work for me. This is what I got:

1$ dotnet migrate
2No executable found matching command "dotnet-migrate"

I tried re-updating dotnet by downloading the latest setup (v1.0.1) from here, but it din’t help either.

That’s when I happened to run dotnet --info from the project directory:

 1$ dotnet --info
 2.NET Command Line Tools (1.0.0-preview2-1-003177)
 3
 4Product Information:
 5 Version:            1.0.0-preview2-1-003177
 6 Commit SHA-1 hash:  a2df9c2576
 7
 8Runtime Environment:
 9 OS Name:     Mac OS X
10 OS Version:  10.11
11 OS Platform: Darwin
12 RID:         osx.10.11-x64

Notice the version? It’s still using the old tooling.

However running it from ~ showed this as I’d expect:

 1$ dotnet --info
 2.NET Command Line Tools (1.0.1)
 3
 4Product Information:
 5 Version:            1.0.1
 6 Commit SHA-1 hash:  005db40cd1
 7
 8Runtime Environment:
 9 OS Name:     Mac OS X
10 OS Version:  10.11
11 OS Platform: Darwin
12 RID:         osx.10.11-x64
13 Base Path:   /usr/local/share/dotnet/sdk/1.0.1

That’s when I realized the culprit. The project had a global.json file with the old SDK version in it.

All I had to do was update the SDK version in it to 1.0.1:

1{
2  "projects": [ "." ],
3  "sdk": {
4    "version": "1.0.1"
5  }
6}

And everything worked as expected.

The global.json file is used to select an SDK version and is useful because:

1. You can be sure that everyone in your team uses the same SDK version
2. You can have multiple SDK versions installed and use different SDKs for different projects if need be.

Official Documentation on global.json here.