.NET Aspire

Core Principles

1. AppHost orchestrates; it is never deployed itself — Aspire's core job is the local development experience: starting services, databases, and message brokers together. Modern Aspire also generates deployment assets (aspire publish for docker-compose/Kubernetes manifests, aspire deploy for Azure Container Apps) — but the AppHost process itself stays a dev/build-time tool, not a production runtime.
2. Service defaults are your baseline — The ServiceDefaults project configures OpenTelemetry, health checks, and resilience for all services in one place.
3. Use Aspire integrations — Aspire has built-in integrations for PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, SQL Server, and more. They handle connection strings, health checks, and tracing automatically.
4. The dashboard is your observability tool — Use the Aspire dashboard for local development tracing, logging, and metrics instead of setting up Seq/Grafana locally.

Patterns

AppHost Configuration

// AppHost/Program.cs
var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);