If you are not aware yet Visual Studio 2017 shipped with support for a newer project format (informally known as the SDK project format). The newer format came about for a variety of reasons including:

• The traditional project format is very verbose.
• The traditional project format is hard to read and edit.
• The traditional project format requires the file to be modified for every change made to the project.
• The .NET Core project.json format did not easily map to the traditional project format.

While the focus on the new format has been to support .NET Core applications it can be used with many other project types as well, with restrictions discussed later. In this article I will discuss how to migrate a traditional project file to the newer SDK format. There are numerous other blogs on this same topic if you want to get different viewpoints.