.NET Aspire
So far you have run the entire platform with Docker Compose. Docker Compose is great for production-like environments, but during development you want:
- Automatic service discovery — no hardcoded hostnames or ports
- A live dashboard — see all services, their logs, traces, and metrics in one place
- Dependency ordering — wait for SQL Server to be ready before starting APIs, without writing health-check scripts
.NET Aspire provides all of this for local development.
.NET Aspire is a development-time tool. It does not deploy to production. The Docker Compose setup remains the production/demo configuration.
In this section of the workshop we will introduce Aspire into the solution.