Converting a .Net Standard console app into a .Net Core console app

Converting a .Net Standard console app into a .Net Core console app

If you have a simple .Net console app and you’d like to convert it into a .Net Core app so that you can run it from the command line on any platform (as long as you install .Net Core), here’s what to do:

  • Remove the following files and folders from your project:
    • Bin folder
    • Obj folder
    • Packages folder
    • Properties / Assemblyinfo.cs
    • config
  • Create a new temp folder and run this command in that folder: dotnet new console
    • Take the csproj file created by that command and use it to replace the csproj file in your original project (using the name of the original csproj file).
    • !! If your original csproj file was in a nested folder, the new csproj file will have to be in the root.
      • But your program.cs file can stay where it was.
      • Or you can create a *.sln folder at the root level and add references to any nested csproj files.
        • To create a sln file: dotnet new sln
        • To add a csproj file (in a nested tests folder) to your sln file: dotnet sln add .\tests\tests.csproj
    • Command line: dotnet restore
    • Now you can build and run the new project from the command line: dotnet run
  • Check the old project for packages to include:
    • Look in packages.config
    • For instance, if you see a line that looks like this:
      • <package id=”NUnit” version=”3.11.0″ targetFramework=”net452″ />
    • …you need to run this on the command line: dotnet add package nunit -v 3.11.0
    • !!! If NUnit is one of the packages, you need to do some extra actions – see Adding NUnit tests to a .Net Core console app.
  • Gotchas:
    • You can’t build and run a console app in Visual Studio if the code is in Google Drive. You’ll get a very generic uninformative error – “Unable to start program … refresh the process list”.
    • If you try to add the NUnit package manually, you may get errors. Follow the actions in Adding NUnit tests to a .Net Core console app to fix.
      • Otherwise you may get the following errors:
      • 1) “Unable to find tests” Fix this with the following command (check version – this was Oct 2018): dotnet add package Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk -v 15.7.2
      • 2) “Program has more than one entry point defined”. This is fixed by adding the following sub-element to a <PropertyGroup> element in your csproj file:
      • 3) “No test is available”. Fix this by adding the NUnit3TestAdapter package (at time of writing – Oct 2018 – this was version 3.10.0).

See also the following post:

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