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.NET Aspire

.NET Aspire is designed to make building cloud-ready apps easier and more productive. While .NET already supports powerful tools like Health Checks, YARP, and gRPC, cloud development can still feel complex and distracting.

Aspire helps by offering a simple, cloud-optimized stack for building scalable, reliable, and observable apps—whether it's a large distributed system or just a single ASP.NET Core app using a database or cache. It improves performance, supports easy container builds, and focuses on what developers care about most: writing business logic without cloud complexity.

Orchestrating Local Development with .NET Aspire App Host

Building distributed apps usually means managing many parts like APIs, databases, and caches—all running together. This can be hard to set up and manage, especially during development.

.NET Aspire solves this with the App Host project. It lets you define and manage all parts of your app (called resources) using simple C# code. You can set up projects, services like PostgreSQL and Redis, and how they connect—all in one place.

For example, with a few lines of C#:

• You can add a PostgreSQL server and database.

• Add Redis for caching.

• Connect a backend API and a frontend web project.

• Link everything together so they work smoothly.

When you run the App Host, Aspire:

• Starts containers for services like PostgreSQL and Redis.

• Injects connection strings and config values automatically.

• Attaches the debugger if you're using Visual Studio.

Two Modes:

• Run mode is for development.

• Publish creates a manifest for deployment, but the App Host doesn’t run in production.

Aspire also supports popular tools like Node.js, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Azure, AWS, and more—plus you can add your own services with just C#.

You’ll also get a dashboard to view everything that’s running, making development faster and easier.