The absolutely horrendous things you need to do to migrate to ASP.NET Core 6.x from 3.x & .NET 4.8

I have a very large code base with Service Fabric projects referencing ASP.NET Core Web API 3.x on the .NET Framework 4.8 (yeah, tell me about how crazy this even sounds — makes no sense to me).

I was forced to migrate these projects to ASP.NET Core 6.x today because of nuget hell, which is the new dll hell. Microsoft totally went crazy with these nuget packages. It is absolute madness to add these references and most importantly to remove them, because the old ASP.NET Core added a gazillion package dependencies, and I have not found a way to tell Visual Studio 2022 to blow away the whole thing with all its dependencies.

Even with a command line, it is a VS hang procedure which takes hours.

I’m almost there.

What stumped me was how the heck do I add references to the new ASP.NET Core 6.x nuget packages?

The new packages are not on nuget.org, and the only thing I could find was a package where it says do not use it as a reference.

All of the useless MSDN Microsoft documentation is geared towards newbies only. It’s like none of their existing customers are real. They will only document how to…