Aaron Powell: .NET Aspire Community Toolkit – Episode 330

Challenges

  • Lack of community-driven tools and resources in the .NET ecosystem
  • Difficulty in finding accessible and open-source solutions for .NET developers
  • Limited support for developers in building enterprise-level .NET applications

Solutions

  • The Aspire Community Toolkit provides open-source resources for .NET developers
  • Offers easy-to-use components and tools to streamline development processes
  • Helps developers contribute to a growing community that improves tools and practices

Benefits

  • Simplifies the development process by providing ready-to-use tools
  • Enhances collaboration within the .NET community
  • Accelerates the development of high-quality, enterprise-level .NET applications

Aaron is a Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Having spent 15 years doing web development, he’s seen it all, from browser wars to the rise of AJAX and the fall of 20 JavaScript frameworks (and that was just yesterday!). Always tinkering with something new, he explores crazy ideas like writing your own implementation of numbers in .NET, creating IoC in JavaScript, or implementing tic-tac-toe using git commits. When not sitting at a computer, he can be found spending time with his wife and kids.

Topics of Discussion:
[04:38] Aaron shares his career journey, including his time in consulting and technical sales.
[06:48] The importance of understanding both technical and business aspects of software development.
[07:36] .NET Aspire and the community toolkit.
[15:21] Having a centralized place for discovering and contributing integrations.
[17:02] Running Ollama.
[21:12] Diving in more to the integration.
[24:27] Deployment options for .NET Aspire applications, including Azure Container Apps and Kubernetes.
[29:08] Testing and Acceptance with .NET Aspire.
[35:02] The process of attaching debuggers to applications and the challenges of debugging distributed applications.
[41:23] The community toolkit provides clear guidelines and contributing guides to help developers get involved.
[43:42] How people can get more involved and contribute.