A Practical Path to Building AI-Ready Applications on Azure App Service

1 minute read • By Andrew Westgarth and Gaurav Seth • August 31, 2026

Migrating an existing Windows application to the cloud can be challenging when it depends on server roles, local storage, registry access, or third-party libraries. If technologies such as System.Drawing, Crystal Reports, MSMQ, Windows services, or drive-letter-based storage are blocking your migration, this recorded session is for you.

Perhaps rewriting the application would take months, or you no longer have access to all the original source code. Even after migrating, you may be wondering how to bring AI capabilities to the business logic you already have.

In A Practical Path to Building AI-Ready Applications on Azure App Service, the team demonstrates how three Azure App Service capabilities can create a practical, incremental modernization path:

Managed Instance on Azure App Service helps move Windows applications to a managed platform while preserving important operating system and application dependencies.
GitHub Copilot app modernization can assess applications and accelerate modernization when source code is available.
Built-in MCP on Azure App Service can expose existing APIs as Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, making them available to agents without requiring you to build and host a separate MCP server.

The session also includes an end-to-end demonstration showing how these capabilities work together.

Instead of starting with a large, risky rewrite, you can lift, extend, and modernize: move the application first, take advantage of the managed Azure App Service platform, and then add modern and AI-powered experiences incrementally.

If you are facing a migration project that could take 6, 12, or even 18 months, watch the recording to see how this approach can help shorten and simplify the journey.