Aspire – Beyond the Basics

Description

In this deep-dive Live! 360 session, Loek Duys takes you beyond the basics of Aspire and into the internals that power local orchestration, service discovery, extensibility, and deployment workflows. Designed for developers who already know Aspire, this session peels back the curtain on how it really works—and how you can bend it to your needs. You’ll explore the App Host, the Developer Control Plane (DCP), Aspire’s built-in reverse proxy, and its Kubernetes-compatible management API. Through live demos and real code, Luke shows how Aspire launches and monitors apps, containers, and sidecars; avoids port conflicts; wires up service discovery; and enables powerful custom integrations and publishers for Docker, Kubernetes, and Azure environments. 🔑 What You’ll Learn • What Aspire’s App Host actually does (and what it doesn’t) • How the Developer Control Plane (DCP) orchestrates processes, containers, and telemetry • How Aspire avoids port conflicts using a built-in reverse proxy • How service discovery works using standard ASP.NET Core features • How to build custom Aspire integrations and host extensions • How Aspire’s graph model enables publishing and deployment to Docker, Kubernetes, and Azure • When (and when not) to use Aspire pipelines for deployment workflows ⏱️ Chapters 01:13 What Aspire is (and why it’s no longer “.NET Aspire”) 02:45 AskVantage Demo app architecture (OCR, LLMs, state storage) 04:23 How Aspire launches apps and dependencies 07:02 The App Host demystified 11:38 App Host vs Developer Control Plane (DCP) 12:48 DCP architecture: DCP, DCPCTRL, DCPPROC 15:59 How debugging works when launching from an IDE 17:03 Live demo: inspecting Aspire’s process tree 20:18 Containers, monitoring, and telemetry flow 22:15 Built-in reverse proxy & avoiding port conflicts 24:30 Demo: proxy behavior and multiple instances 26:42 DCP management API & Kubernetes-style config 30:17 Using kubectl-style tools with Aspire 32:04 Demo: launching executables and containers via DCP 35:08 Why DCP is not Kubernetes (and never for production) 36:03 Service discovery with ASP.NET Core 39:07 Demo: service discovery in the Aspire dashboard 42:41 Custom integrations & Aspire extensions 44:15 Building a custom LLM (Ollama) integration 50:34 Surfacing lifecycle events in the Aspire dashboard 52:48 Publishing & deployment concepts 54:11 Aspire publishers: Docker, Kubernetes, Azure 55:01 Aspire pipelines overview 57:00 Demo: generating Docker Compose output 1:00:12 Wrap-up & key takeaways 👤 Speaker: Loek Duys Independent Cloud Architect, LoekD Consultancy 🔗 Links • Download Visual Studio 2026: http://visualstudio.com/download • Explore more Live! 360 sessions: https://aka.ms/L360Orlando25 • Join upcoming VS Live! events: https://aka.ms/VSLiveEvents #aspire #dotnet