Appendix A. Setting up the development environment
This appendix covers
- Minimal system requirements
- Installing .NET Aspire
- Setting up a .NET Aspire project
A.1 Minimal system requirements
Before we can work with Aspire, we will need to have the following components installed on our development machine:
- .NET 8 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 .NET SDK (preferably the latest version), which can be downloaded via the following link:
The easiest way to get started with Aspire is via Visual Studio. The latest version of Visual Studio already includes all the relevant components. The caveat is that it’s only available on Windows. If you have your development environment on a Windows machine, you can download the latest version of Visual Studio via the following link:
Alternatively, we can download JetBrains Rider, which is available on any operating system that supports .NET. Although it doesn’t come with an equivalent of Model Builder, it comes with a whole set of other advanced .NET tools, such as the ability to decompile reference assemblies.
Unlike Visual Studio, which has a free Community Edition version, JetBrains Rider a premium IDE that requires a paid license. It can be downloaded via the following link: