Appendix. Setting up the development environment
Before using Aspire, you have to set up your development machine. This appendix covers all prerequisites, starting with basic system requirements. We’ll go through the components to preinstall, including the .NET SDK and appropriate code editors or IDEs we can use, depending on the machine’s operating system.
Then we’ll install Aspire itself and make sure that we have all the available project templates. Finally, we’ll get familiar with the process of creating a new Aspire project.
A.1 Minimal system requirements
Before we can work with Aspire, we have to install the following components on our development machine:
- .NET 10 SDK or later
- A suitable IDE or code editor (Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, or JetBrains Rider)
- A container runtime, such as Docker or Podman
The main dependency is the .NET SDK (preferably the latest version), which you can download at https://dotnet.microsoft.com/.
The easiest way to start with Aspire is through Visual Studio. The latest version of Visual Studio includes all the relevant components. The caveat is that it’s available only in Windows. If your development environment is on a Windows machine, you can download the latest version of Visual Studio at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/. Alternatively, you can download JetBrains Rider, which is available for any operating system that supports .NET.