10 Adding legacy apps to Aspire and working with AI agents
This chapter covers
- Upgrading from Aspire 8 and 9 to Aspire 13
- Adding existing .NET projects to Aspire
- Moving existing infrastructure components to Aspire
- Integrating Aspire with AI coding agents
So far, we’ve seen how to build distributed applications with Aspire. We’ve also looked at how to create deployment scripts for such applications and extend Aspire functionality. But all these examples involved the evergreen Aspire 13.
But Aspire has been production-ready since version 8 was released in 2023. Version 9 was released in 2024, and many systems in the wild still use one of these versions. How do you modernize these systems and make them run on Aspire 13? We’ll learn how in this chapter.
But that’s not all. What if your application wasn’t on Aspire to begin with, even though it would have benefited from being hosted on Aspire? Tooling is available that makes adding existing applications to Aspire easy. This includes adding the infrastructure components you may have distributed throughout your system, such as databases and message brokers. You’ll see how easy it is to convert these components to Aspire integrations while keeping the existing production versions intact.