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Microsoft Making Big .NET Aspire Push, So What Is It?
Microsoft is making a big push to publicize its new .NET Aspire tech stack for streamlining the development of .NET cloud-native services.
The company unveiled .NET Aspire at last month's Build 2024 developer conference, describing it as an opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building observable, production ready, distributed, cloud-native applications with .NET.
".NET Aspire brings together tools, templates, and NuGet packages that help you build distributed applications in .NET more easily," the company said last month. "Whether you're building a new application, adding cloud-native capabilities to an existing one, or are already deploying .NET apps to production in the cloud today, .NET Aspire can help you get there faster."
[Click on image for larger view.] .NET Aspire (source: Microsoft).
.NET Aspire is claimed to help users with:
- Orchestration: .NET Aspire provides features for running and connecting multi-project applications and their dependencies for local development environments.
- Components: .NET Aspire components are NuGet packages for commonly used services, such as Redis or Postgres, with standardized interfaces ensuring they connect consistently and seamlessly with your app.
- Tooling: .NET Aspire comes with project templates and tooling experiences for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and the dotnet CLI to help you create and interact with .NET Aspire projects.
- Service Discovery: Automatic injection the right connection strings or network configurations and service discovery information to simplify the developer experience.
- Dashboard: See live OpenTelemetry data with no configuration required. Launched by default on run, .NET Aspire's developer dashboard shows logs, environment variables, distributed traces, metrics and more to quickly verify app behavior.
- Deployment: manages injecting the right connection strings or network configurations and service discovery information to simplify the developer experience.
Devs can get started with .NET Aspire with the .NET CLI, Visual Studio 2022 v17.10 or the Visual Studio Code C# Dev Kit.
This month Microsoft has been busy promoting new guidance, documentation and information for .NET Aspire.
On Tuesday, for example, Microsoft posted an invitation for Developer Blog readers to "Join Us for .NET Aspire Developers Day -- Elevate Your Cloud Native Skills!" on July 23, 2024.
Event highlights include:
- Keynote Sessions: Glenn Condron and Maddy Montaquila will kick off the event, sharing the latest updates and future vision for .NET Aspire. Learn firsthand how .NET Aspire can simplify your development process and accelerate your projects.
- Deep Dive Sessions: Our experts, including Jerry Nixon, Mitch Denny, and Dan Wahlin, will guide you through advanced topics such as building custom components, integrating with enterprise services, and extending your applications with .NET Aspire.
- Community and Ecosystem: Discover how the broader web community and our key partners, like MongoDB, New Relic, and Raygun, are contributing to the .NET Aspire ecosystem. Get inspired by their success stories and learn how to integrate their tools into your own projects.
Just two days before, Microsoft posted "Let's Learn .NET Aspire -- Start your cloud-native journey live!" as part of its "Let's Learn .NET" series. Taking place yesterday, the event's detailed two-hour video featuring Jeff Fritz is now available for replay.
Following that event in English, events in a string of different languages kicked off today:
Devs wanting to watch those events should first get a full collection of resources prepared for the event, featuring materials such as GitHub's "Let's Learn .NET Aspire" repo and a full accompanying workshop.
[Click on image for larger view.] Weather Workshop (source: Microsoft).
The all-new workshop will teach building out a weather browser with a Blazor front-end, interacting with live weather data from the US National Weather Service.
And if all of the above isn't enough, Microsoft has also published a slew of recent documentation and guidance for .NET Aspire:
.NET Aspire is obviously an important new initiative for Microsoft, which has been increasingly using it to promote more Azure development, long a key focus at Redmond. So stay tuned to see what the company "aspires" to next along those lines.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.