A good intro to .NET Aspire from the 2024 Build Conference

This is another 46-minute, 10-month-old video from the last Build conference that I found extremely helpful in explaining what .NET Aspire is and what it’s good for.

Demystify cloud-native development with .NET Aspire | BRK181 by Microsoft Developer (YouTube)

Damian Edwards and David Fowler do a soup-to-nuts demonstration of Aspire. It basically lets you configure your multi-project, distributed projects with code rather than with YAML (e.g. dockercompose.yml). Instead, it writes the files for you and handles the deployment to Docker. This lets you much more easily create and configure things like email servers (for registration workflows), queues, databases, etc. Some of the resources run in Docker containers, some run on Azure if you want. There is a dashboard with deep telemetry, with very nice graphs showing how each service participates in a given request.