Engineering and Technology
| Open Access | Modernizing Enterprise Web Platforms: An Evolutionary Analysis of ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core Transition Strategies
Peter A. Montgomery , University of Melbourne, AustraliaAbstract
The sustained reliance on legacy web application frameworks represents one of the most persistent structural challenges confronting contemporary software-intensive organizations. Among these frameworks, ASP.NET has played a foundational role in enterprise application development for more than two decades, enabling large-scale, mission-critical systems across public and private sectors. However, the accelerating demands for cloud-native deployment, cross-platform operability, scalability, and continuous delivery have progressively exposed the architectural limitations inherent in traditional ASP.NET implementations. This research article presents an extensive and theoretically grounded examination of the evolutionary transition from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core as a paradigmatic instance of legacy system modernization within broader software evolution discourse. Anchored in established theories of software evolution and modernization, the study integrates insights from service-oriented architecture migration, microservices decomposition, agile transformation, risk management, and organizational change literature to construct a holistic analytical framework for understanding ASP.NET Core adoption trajectories. Central to this investigation is the recognition that ASP.NET Core is not merely a technological upgrade but a profound reconfiguration of development philosophy, tooling ecosystems, deployment strategies, and organizational competencies. Drawing extensively on contemporary scholarly work, including the detailed evolutionary analysis of ASP.NET technologies articulated by Valiveti (2025), this article situates ASP.NET Core within a lineage of adaptive responses to
environmental pressures, technological discontinuities, and shifting stakeholder expectations. The research adopts a qualitative, interpretive methodology grounded in comparative literature synthesis and conceptual analysis, enabling a deep exploration of approaches.
Keywords
Legacy system modernization, ASP.NET Core migration, software evolution, web application architecture
References
Evans, L., & Matthews, H. (2021). Scalability and performance issues in legacy system migration to cloud platforms. Journal of Cloud Computing Technology, 13(2), 56–69.
Yeh, R. T., & Austin, T. A. (1986). Software evolution: forging a paradigm. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-12(6), 689–708.
Almonaies, A. A., Cordy, J. R., & Dean, T. R. (2010). Legacy system evolution towards service-oriented architecture. International Workshop on SOA Migration and Evolution, 53–62.
Wolfart, D., Assuncao, W. K. G., da Silva, I. F., Domingos, D. C. P., Schmeing, E., Villaca, G. L. D., & Paza, D. N. (2021). Modernizing legacy systems with microservices: A roadmap. Proceedings of the Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering Conference, 149–159.
Blackwell, S., & Freeman, D. (2021). The impact of modernization on organizational efficiency and profitability. Journal of Business Efficiency, 28(1), 99–113.
Harris, K., & Turner, L. (2020). A framework for legacy system migration in large-scale enterprises. Journal of Enterprise Systems, 19(2), 63–77.
Valiveti, S. S. S. (2025). Evolution of ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core: Tools, strategies, and implementation approaches. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Information Technology, Electronics and Intelligent Communication Systems, 1–7.
Fisher, A., & Gill, S. (2020). Agile adoption in legacy system migrations: Benefits and challenges. Journal of Software Engineering, 19(4), 105–119.
Johnson, G., & Davis, J. (2020). Predictive risk management in legacy system migration. Journal of Risk Analysis and Management, 11(3), 84–98.
Harrison, K., & Jackson, S. (2022). Modernizing IT infrastructures: Combining legacy systems with modern solutions. Journal of Digital Transformation, 16(1), 45–60.
Jha, M. (2014). Building a systematic legacy system modernization approach. Doctoral dissertation, UNSW Sydney.
Zaidman, A., Pinzger, M., & van Deursen, A. (2010). Software evolution. Software Engineering Research Group, Delft University of Technology.
Vinay, T. R., & Chikkamannu, A. A. (2016). A methodology for migration of software from single-core to multi-core machine. International Conference on Computational Systems and Information Systems for Sustainable Solutions, 367–369.
Yadav, S. K., Khare, A., & Kavita, C. (2020). ASK approach: A pre-migration approach for legacy application migration to cloud. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 1042, 15–27.
Download and View Statistics
Copyright License
Copyright (c) 2025 Peter A. Montgomery
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain the copyright of their manuscripts, and all Open Access articles are disseminated under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY), which licenses unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is appropriately cited. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations.