.NET Aspire 8.2 features onboarding and testing improvements and makes progress toward build support planned for the upcoming 9.0 release. Credit: iStock .NET Aspire 8.2, a new version of Microsoft’s cloud stack for building distributed applications, has arrived. The latest version features improvements for onboarding and testing. Developers can download the release, announced August 29, from learn.microsoft.com. With this release, .NET Aspire components now are called Integrations. These are packages to be added to an app that streamline the process of setting up, starting up, and communicating with prominent cloud services and platforms. Integrations are used two ways in Aspire: As a hosting package to add to an AppHost project for spinning up resources, and as a package in app code, for connecting to the resource in an AppHost, along with streamlining setup and defaults. .NET Aspire 8.2 also bolsters Microsoft’s test suites, with testing leveraged for integration handling. Version 8.2 arrives just weeks after .NET Aspire 8.1, which arrived on July 23. Microsoft said that work was being done to allow developers to build projects for the planned .NET Aspire 9.0 release without requiring installation of .NET Aspire Workload. This change is expected to improve CI/CD scenarios and other situations where developers may not want to install the workload on a build machine. The 8.2 release made progress toward this goal by moving some components that used to ship with the workload. These were moved to separate packages that will be automatically referenced by a project. .NET Aspire 9.0 ships when .NET 9 ships, which is expected to happen in November. Microsoft .NETCloud ComputingSoftware Development