Microsoft has previewed .NET Aspire, which they describe as stack for building observable, production-ready cloud-native applications. Aspire is included as part of .NET 8.

.NET Aspire is delivered through a collection of NuGet packages that Microsoft has designed for specific cloud-native concerns. It has been designed to help with orchestration, components, and tooling. The orchestration elements provide features for running and connecting multi-project applications and their dependencies.

.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. Finally, .NET Aspire comes with project templates and "tooling experiences" for Visual Studio and the dotnet CLI to help create and interact with .NET Aspire apps.

The Aspire developers say it streamlines the configuration and interconnection of different parts of cloud-native apps, providing abstractions for managing service discovery, environment variables, and container configurations without having to handle low level implementation details.

Aspire's NuGet packages are designed to simplify connections to popular services and platforms, such as Redis or PostgreSQL.The components handle many cloud-native aspects of development through standardized configuration patterns, such as adding health checks and telemetry. Each component is designed to work with .NET Aspire orchestration, and will pass their configurations through dependencies based on .NET project and package references.

.NET Aspire apps follow a standardized structure designed around the default .NET Aspire project templates. Most .NET Aspire apps have at least three projects, a starter app that could be any common .NET project such as a Blazor UI or Minimal API; an AppHost project that is used to manage the high level orchestration concerns of the app; and a ServiceDefaults project that contains default .NET Aspire app configurations that can be extended and customized. There are currently two .NET Aspire starter templates, a basic starter template, and an expanded template that also includes boilerplate UI and API projects. These projects are pre-configured with service discovery, and boilerplate extension methods that handle common service configurations for you.

Aspire preview is available as part of .NET 8 now, and on GitHub. 

More Information

.NET 8 Download

Aspire On GitHub

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