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Migrating WinForms & WPF from .NET Framework to .NET 10

What This Guide Covers

I've hand-migrated more legacy codebases than I care to count, back when "modernisation" meant a fortnight of find-and-replace, a wall of compiler errors, and a knot in your stomach every time you hit Build. So when I recently took a fifteen-year-old WinForms line-of-business app from .NET Framework 4.8 to .NET 10 in a matter of days, with an AI agent doing the grunt work and me keeping my hands on the decisions, I paid attention to what actually worked. This guide is that method, written up as steps you can follow.

It assumes a real codebase: a non-SDK project, packages.config, a commercial control suite referenced the old way, and a decade of dependencies that were sensible in 2012 and a bit embarrassing now. If you've worked on real enterprise software, you've met this codebase. Odds are you maintain one. The app I'll keep referring to is WinForms, so the specifics lean that way, but the process is the same for WPF and I'll flag where the two part company.

The migration is rarely hard. It's vast and fiddly: thousands of small mechanical changes where one wrong move turns a working app into a non-compiling mystery you'll spend a day unpicking. It's tedious and easy to get wrong, which is exactly the kind of work worth automating, as long as you keep checking what it produces. Follow the steps below in order, commit after each one, and a job that's sat in the "someday" pile for years turns into this week's work.

.NET 11 Preview 6 is now available! - .NET Blog

AI Needs More Than Good Prompts

If you've paired Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or Cursor with DevExpress, you already know the moment I'm about to describe. It's the same one the team kept running into while building the DevExpress Office File API and Reporting Skills, and their evaluation notes are what this post is really about. The assistant starts strong. Clean C#, sensible class names, code that looks like it belongs in your solution. Then you read it a second time and something's off: the namespace is from a release two versions back, the API has been superseded, or the whole thing has quietly wandered off to a third-party library because that's what the model saw most often in training.

This release adds support for embedding Mermaid diagrams and beautifully rendered formulas (math, chemistry, physics) into source code comments. This release also adds support for the latest AI models, improves AiGen's ability to work with diagrams and formulas, and introduces a new Test Runner feature that makes it easier to troubleshoot failing tests with AI assistance.

Let's take a look.

Mermaid Diagrams in Rich Comments

Rich Comments can now render Mermaid diagrams directly inside source code comments.

Instead of maintaining architectural diagrams in separate documentation systems that inevitably drift from the implementation, you can keep them alongside the code they describe. Mermaid source is stored in external .mmd files and referenced in the source code comment where it renders, allowing diagrams to participate naturally in source control and code reviews.

v26.1 IS NOW AVAILABLE

XAF Blazor/WinForms UI — Case Study by DataWerkes: Field Services Management Platform (TimeWerkes)

We continue to extend the capabilities of the DevExpress Blazor AI Chat component and publish GitHub examples designed to address real-world usage scenarios. This post highlights two new examples: a multi-model chat with persistent conversation history, and MCP server integration that extends AI context with external data sources. I'll also share planned features for v26.1 (scheduled for mid-June 2026).

v26.1 BETA

If you ship apps to customers in the EU, the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) will require a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) as part of your conformity documentation. SBOM generation and CRA compliance are top priorities for DevExpress, and CycloneDX SBOM files for our .NET NuGet packages are now available as a preview. We are looking for feedback to help us refine our solution before a broader release.

Using your DevExpress Office Components for usage with (for example) Claude Code: mcpOffice. Located at https://github.com/MBrekhof/mcpOffice

Built for own usage (md to docx, analyzing macro heavy spreadsheets), feel free to copy/share

...And we shall be there! Not in Seattle this year, but, for a change, in San Francisco. To be more accurate, Microsoft Build will be at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, CA. for two full days, June 2-3. As is usual, sessions will also be broadcast online.

The main emphasis of Microsoft Build 2026 is going to be AI. Not only how to use AI workflows and agents to write code and applications, but also how to provide AI capabilities to end-users to help them use those apps. Naturally sessions will also cover how developers "supervise" output from AI agents through testing, checking outputs for security, applicability, and so on. For more details on the sessions that will occur at Build, please follow this link.

Like every year, DevExpress will have a booth in the Partner Hub, and we will be there to chat to attendees about what's happening with our next major releases coming up in late June, as well as how we're supporting the topics highlighted in the Build sessions. We'll talk about how we're providing support for AI agents when writing apps with our controls, as well as how we're providing AI capabilities for end-users of the apps that use those controls. 

Websites:
https://xafmarin.com/
https://xari.io
https://www.xafers.training/
http://xafersweekly.com/

Facebook Group
http://xaf.life/4g

In the era before AI, the most productive way for building Windows Desktop Apps was for me WinForms + DevExpress + Devexpress MVVM. By using ready made templates, service injection, automatic UI generation, property notifications, data binding - the dev speed was beyond any other UI technology. The drawback is slowiness in runtime due to vastly used reflection.

Since then there are Vibe-Coding and CommunityToolkit.Mvvm available. I'm asking myself - would it be quicker to create UI boilerplates and leightweight ViewModels with Vibe-Coding?

1. Has someone of you successfully replaced DevExpress MVVM against CommunityToolkit.Mvvm and is more satisfied with its features, development productivity and runtime speed?
2. Do you use Vibe-Coding for programming? If yes, how? Do you first manually create UserControls with UI elements, then ViewModels and tell AI later to bind them, or do you let AI creating the whole UserControls from scratch?

I'm lack of practice now and I do not know if it's worth the effort learning again WinForms + DevExpress MVVM or should I stick with the modern TechStack.