Microsoft releases a new major version of the.NET framework every November. Additionally, the 2023.NET Conference unveiled.NET 8, the biggest update to date, emphasizing the critical role of.NET Aspire. Since its modest beginnings, more than 20 years ago,.NET has been progressively advancing toward its goal of giving developers access to an extensive and potent suite of tools and services for building software applications. While the initial focus of.NET was developing desktop applications and, to a lesser extent, early web applications, the current focus is evidently on developing robust and feature-rich cloud-native web applications that can operate on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.
The main announcement at this year's conference was the launch of a new product named .NET Aspire. You should have a clear understanding of Aspire's features and the reasons it should be a valuable addition to your development toolset after reading this article.
What is .Net Aspire exactly?
.NET Aspire is a cloud-ready, opinionated stack that makes building cloud-native apps with .NET durable, observable, and configurable easy. It includes a pre-built set of cloud-native components enhanced with resilience, telemetry, health checks, and service discovery.
When combined with an advanced yet user-friendly local developer experience, .NET Aspire simplifies the process of identifying, obtaining, and configuring necessary dependencies for cloud-native applications from the very beginning for both new and pre-existing .NET applications built with .NET 8+.
What precisely does this definition of.NET Aspire mean? Let's dissect this sentence:
- Opinionated: Microsoft has made some choices about the final technology stack's configuration of its many components. Opinionated refers to the fact that these are developed views rather than strict guidelines for how things should be put together to function properly.
- Cloud-ready: Anything you create with Aspire is prepared for public cloud deployment. To prepare an application to run in Azure or even AWS, there isn't an additional step required.
- Stack: Rather than being a one-stop shop, this is a comprehensive technological approach. Stack suggests more things in addition to front-end (client) and back-end (server) programming.
- Building: Although, as we'll see below, you can easily integrate Aspire into an existing application, its primary focus is on developing new distributed applications.
- Observable: Web applications require management and observation. All of the aspects of operating an application in real-time, such as telemetry, health, status, load balancing, user behavior, and more, are collectively referred to as observability.
- Production-ready: Aspire enables you to develop and launch your applications inside Docker containers, making it simple to set up a productive push to production without relying on brittle and complicated scripts.
- Distributed: Modern applications are more commonly a collection (if you will) of discrete actors, such as databases, serverless services, web apps, or API endpoints, than they are monolithic. In the past, it was very difficult to get all those different parts to function as a whole because one mistake could ruin the entire system. The purpose of Aspire is to stop that.
Important Considerations When Using.NET Aspire
Developers have often felt under pressure to become specialists in a wide range of technologies unrelated to developing cloud-native applications, as DevOps has risen in popularity.
This is a typical scenario for current developers: Despite the application's importance to the project, a developer might not have the knowledge to address a fundamental question that comes up during development.
Microsoft's answer to this issue is ASP.NET Development Services, a set of resources that developers may use to create and publish cloud-native applications more quickly. It consists of several tools, services, components, and example codes.
These are the five key concepts related to.NET Aspire that you should understand.
Opinionated Elements
The list of elements that can be included in an Aspire app is as follows.
Concerning this list of fundamental components, several necessary services, including multiple database connections, Redis, Entity Framework, key management, and more, are instantly available.
.NET Application Templates Aspire Application: A simple Aspire application that includes the AppHost and ServiceDefaults projects is perfect for situations in which interacting with an existing .net application or in situations where a Blazor app is not necessary.
.NET Aspire Starter program: This template enhances the.NET Aspire Application with a basic "Hello world!" Blazor program, making it appropriate for clean-sheet development in situations where a Blazor web app is needed.
AppHost in.NET Aspire, ServiceDefaults, and Blazor
AppHost is the orchestrator project that powers all.NET Aspire application projects.
- ServiceDefaults: Telemetry, service discovery, and resilience configurations are shared project managed, and reused across app projects.
- Blazor: an ASP.NET Core Blazor App project designed for interactive C# web user interface development, equipped with default.NET Aspire service configurations.
By streamlining app orchestration and configuration, these parts offer a consistent debugging experience across various app resources.
.NET Aspire Simplifies Orchestration
Aspire excels at developing and implementing distributed applications.
- App Model: This is a grouping of resources that comprise your distributed application; it consists of executables, containers,.NET projects, and cloud resources that your application uses.
- App Host/Orchestrator: The.NET project known as App Host/Orchestrator is in charge of orchestrating every app inside the app model. It manages every project included in the.NET Aspire project.
- Resource: A resource is an executable, database, cache, cloud service, .NET project, container, or other component of an application.
- Reference: Using the 'WithReference' API, a relationship between resources is defined and expressed as a dependence.
- Service Discovery and Connection String Management: The orchestration provided by.NET Aspire makes it easier to manage the setup and connections of cloud-native applications, including service discovery and connection string management.
- Cloud-Agnostic Resources: Through NuGet packages,.NET Aspire offers a range of cloud-agnostic resources, including PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, Node.js, and Kafka.
Kubernetes and Aspire are not interchangeable
Remember that Aspire is not meant to take the role of Kubernetes. Aspire and Kubernetes might work together in a single application.
Aspire is centered around orchestration and containers for the deployment and operation of cloud applications. Clusters of containers running on many hosts can be managed by users with Kubernetes. A manifest list that may be used for Kubernetes deployment can be produced using Aspire.
Container administration is streamlined by Kubernetes, which facilitates the balancing of cloud resources, hosting expenses, and user or customer experience (UX/CX).
To put it simply, you can manage and scale containers in your host environment with Kubernetes and develop and run.NET Aspire programs using Docker containers.
The Dashboard for Developers
Aspire instantly configures and opens a developer dashboard to facilitate debugging your application. The dashboard contains links to live web pages and containers, logs, and traces.
Instead of testing the app locally, you can publish it to an Azure sandbox and run stress tests on it while monitoring the dashboard for any warning signs that might point to issues in a real multi-session host scenario.
Conclusion
A significant step toward Microsoft's objective of making.NET the most efficient and trouble-free platform for developing cloud-native applications is.NET Aspire. Aspire's emphasis on the building process, which includes scaffolding, coding, and debugging, in addition to the operational aspects of applications, will help developers who wish to leverage .NET overcome the hurdle of creating excellent cloud apps.