.NET Aspire cloud development stack launches

Microsoft’s .NET Aspire, an opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building distributed applications, is now generally available.

The .NET Aspire stack was announced on May 21. Intended to simplify cloud-native development, the Aspire stack unites tools, templates, and NuGet packages to build observable, production-ready applications in .NET more easily, the company said. Developers can get started with .NET Aspire now in Visual Studio 2022 17.10, the .NET CLI, or the Visual Studio Code editor. The stack had been in preview since last November.

.NET Aspire is part of an ongoing goal to make .NET one of the most-productive platforms for cloud-native applications, Microsoft said. .NET Aspire features a web-based dashboard that displays details about a running application during the inner development loop, when the developer is writing, building, and debugging code. The dashboard view includes resources in the application model and endpoints, environment variables, and console logs. It also displays OpenTelemetry data sent by resources, such as structured logs, metric information, and distributed traces. Open Telemetry is an open source observability ecosystem.

NET Aspire is launching with components for connecting to database, messaging, cache, and client services. The stack also introduces an App Host project, so developers can use C# and familiar-looking APIs to configure application projects and hosted services that comprise a distributed application. These projects and services collectively are called resources, and code in App Host forms an application model of the distributed application. Launching an App Host project during the inner dev loop ensures all resources in the application model are launched according to how they are described. Adding an App Host project is the first step in adding .Net Aspire to an existing application, Microsoft said.