Back in 2002 I was working as an Application Architect inside Microsoft – and my entire year was spent telling UK companies about this amazing new way of developing solutions for Windows – the .NET Framework (1.0) and Visual Studio.NET. It was an amazing year.

Fast forward 21 years and .NET is still an amazing technology and one used by many of my UK ISVs – but in a variety of flavours. The last significant Windows only version of the .NET Framework was 4.8 released in 2019 – but alongside that a new flavour emerged, a version of .NET that worked great on Windows, MacOS and Linux and simply called .NET (Ok – originally it was called .NET Core but now it is simply .NET). What a journey!

My ISVs (and perhaps your company) are now looking at ways to take their significant investment in .NET Framework based solutions to the AWS cloud. First up – those .NET Framework solutions will run just fine on Microsoft Windows running on AWS as EC2 instances or containers within ECS. But ….there are significant benefits around cost efficiency if you take those applications and move them from the .NET Framework running on Windows to .NET running on Linux. Handily some of my colleagues have pulled together a fine blog post talking through those options – check out Refactor to Modern .NET and Move to Linux published Oct 2023.