Migration plan from .NET 4 to .NET 4.6.1

At Wheelhouse, we have a few legacy applications running at various version of .NET from 4 up to 4.6.

• Re-target all projects to .NET 4.6.1. in a feature branch, building to catch usage of deprecated BCL features

• Review change log for each intervening release of .NET to find breaking changes that could affect our applications

• Install .NET 4.6.1 (in-place upgrade) on the build and staging servers

• Build existing codebase, without retargeting framework version, on build server, deploy to staging server

• Run through critical functionality of our applications using MVC, Web API, WCF, and Console on staging to mimic an in-place upgrade on production

• Upgrade/patch all production servers with .NET 4.6.1

• Upgrade MSBuild on build server

• Merge in code targeting 4.6.1 to master, build on build server, test on staging

• Redeploy all applications on production, targeting .NET 4.6.1