1 Introduction to .NET Aspire
This chapter covers
- Overview of .NET Aspire
- Distributed applications and the challenges they face
- The concept of orchestrator inside distributed applications
- The structure of the book
In November 2023, the .NET community was taken by surprise. This is when .NET 8 was released along with C# 12. While these updates were completely expected, a thing that got released alongside them was completely unexpected. This thing was .NET Aspire.
There were no announcements of it before its initial release. It was developed in total secrecy. However, once it was released, it had a huge impact on the .NET development community. Every .NET influencer and blogger started talking about it and many businesses started adopting it.
The reason behind such a huge success was that Aspire provided an elegant solution to a problem that plagued software engineers for many years. It provided an easy way to develop and debug distributed applications locally.
Traditionally, building distributed applications was very hard. Developers had to launch different processes, emulate various services, and disable some parts of the application to make it even possible to run on a development machine. Aspire changed all of it. The whole distributed application can now be launched locally in a single process and all of its services can be easily debugged.
Just like Docker before it, Aspire enabled applications to run in a development environment the same way they can be run in production.