I got very excited about .NET Aspire recently, not just because yay .NET finally gets enterprise tooling after *how* long but at the way it brings the outer loop into the inner loop so telemetry from prod is right where the developer will see it and start to grok observability
When I wrote this, my pieces for The Stack weren't behind the paywall; they're now popular enough that they might be.
my first piece for The Stack (free registration required, they promise no spam): I get @davidfowl.com & colleagues to explain to me how .NET Aspire is not just the enterprise tooling .NET has already needed, not just improving developer productivity building cloud apps but also deployment manifests
...that give developers and deployers a common language for talking about the needs of an app on the platform it will run on. I got very excited because it's been nearly 20 years since Visual Studio 'Whitehorse' aka 2005 started trying to get developers to stop throwing code over the wall at ops!
I really did get excited about Aspire because local development isn't going away but you have to handle connected resources and show me a mock that's truly accurate to the live production system every time in every way, I'll wait: I like the Aspire approach to specifying that in a standard way and I hope we see more of it. Especially as Aspire aspires (sorry) to be more than just .NET and it uses building blocks developers already know while nudging them into areas they need to learn.
I got so excited talking to the .NET Aspire team because that still happens so much, because despite devops devs still aren't in the weeds of infra and observability and those need to be connected back to them in ways that make sense in their terms. also a theme of the Next.js piece I'm writing now!
Since this came up as a question from at least one person, I'll include it here (I cover Dapr and Radius themselves elsewhere).
I just didn't have time to get into the DAPR overlap; you could ping @davidfowl.com for his take but I know the Diagrid folks also did a good explainer on the difference in scope and the recent .NET Aspire Day event had sessions covering this too
“We're trying to build this ecosystem of reusable components to help people that are in any environment, any cloud, any operating system get off the ground quickly."
open source
platform engineering
.NET
Aspire
Microsoft
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cloud
application modelling
distributed applications
telemetry