Microsoft Reactor

.NET Day on Agentic Modernization helps .NET developers modernize existing apps without the rewrite—so you can spend less time fighting legacy code and more time shipping new features, improving performance, and building AI-powered experiences on Azure.

What you will learn:

• Accelerate Cloud Migration: Use GitHub Copilot modernization in Visual Studio to speed up legacy .NET upgrades, turning months of manual refactoring into automated steps.

• Build AI-Driven Systems: Craft autonomous agentic experiences using the Microsoft Agent Framework paired with Microsoft Foundry.

• Automate Cloud Development: Leverage GitHub Copilot for Azure (via Azure MCP) to handle infrastructure scripting, deployment, and troubleshooting within your workflow.

By attending, engineering teams will learn how to slash maintenance overhead, unlock advanced cloud-scale AI capabilities, and free up critical development cycles to focus on high-value innovation.

Agenda

Sessions

Modernize .NET Apps with GitHub Copilot
Mika Dumont, Microsoft

Modernizing .NET Framework applications can feel daunting but with GitHub Copilot, it doesn't have to be. In this session, we'll show how GitHub Copilot modernization helps teams assess, plan, and execute .NET upgrades using AI-assisted workflows. We'll demo real-world migration scenarios showing how AI reduces the manual effort, risk, and time traditionally associated with large-scale modernization. Whether you're upgrading from .NET Framework or moving to the latest .NET, you'll leave with practical strategies to get started today.

Stop Rewriting. Start with Aspire.
David Pine, Microsoft

Skip the weekend of YAML and hand-rolled OTel. We'll tour the Aspire onboarding flow — aspire init and the new Aspireify agent skill — and let it modernize an existing .NET app live. The legendary MVC Music Store is the willing volunteer.

Cold Case or Active Asset? A 2005 WinForms Line of Business Application
Merrie McGaw, Microsoft | Klaus Loeffelmann, Microsoft

This application has been in continuous use for nearly two decades: a focused line of business system built on SQL Server, originally developed in VB on .NET Framework 2.0 using early Windows Forms. Quietly deployed and rarely revisited, it continues to operate today in real production environments. It's the kind of system many organizations depend on but hesitate to change — complex, business critical, and deeply embedded. Merrie McGaw and Klaus Loeffelmann take a fresh look. Using .NET 10 and modern AI-assisted tooling, they explore what it takes to evolve an authentic legacy WinForms application — no simplified demos, no idealized starting points. Just a real codebase, with real history, and a pragmatic examination of how far modernization can realistically go.

Cloud-Native Data Without Starting Over
Jerry Nixon, Microsoft

Modernizing your application does not have to mean rebuilding it. Many line-of-business applications are tightly connected to their data, making cloud migration feel risky, expensive, and disruptive. But what if the database could move first? This session explores practical patterns for incremental migration without the rewrite or architectural chaos. This is not a "lift and pray" migration, nor a bunch of compromises and workarounds. With stable API layers, modern data access patterns, and new tooling, we will demonstrate how applications can evolve through strategies designed for real systems, real budgets, and real engineering teams.

Modernize Fast, Migrate Faster: .NET Apps to Azure with Modernize CLI
Kaushaya Ganguly, Microsoft

Modernizing and migrating .NET apps to Azure usually means weeks or months of manual refactoring. The GitHub Copilot Modernize CLI enables agentic, end-to-end application modernization — for a single .NET app or many at once. We'll take a real .NET app through the CLI end-to-end, then use the same tool to modernize the codebase to make it Azure ready, provision Azure infrastructure, and deploy it to Azure App Service. From there, we'll surface three capabilities worth knowing for production use: batch modernization to run the same workflow across many repositories in parallel, CI/CD pipeline integration to make modernization a repeatable build step, and custom skills to bake your organization's migration patterns, internal libraries, and coding standards into every run.

Modernize .NET Apps and Add Agentic Functionality in Minutes
Gaurav Seth, Microsoft | Andrew Westgarth, Microsoft | Jordan Selig, Microsoft

Modernize legacy applications to Managed Instance on Azure App Service without code rewrites, then instantly expose them as AI-agent accessible tools using built-in MCP. This end-to-end flow enables customers to unlock agent-driven automation and new AI-powered experiences on existing apps — a capability previously too complex or impractical to pursue — helping meet modern user expectations without rebuilding core systems or adding infrastructure.

App Modernization Done. Now Let's Make It Smarter.
Bruno Capuano, Microsoft

OK, you migrated your app, now what? In this 30-minute session, we'll explore practical ways to bring AI into an existing Azure-hosted application using Microsoft Foundry. We'll look at approachable post-migration scenarios like analyzing application logs, extracting useful insights, or generating smarter reports — without rebuilding everything from scratch. A general, demo-friendly session for teams wondering how to turn a modernized app into a smarter app.