Distributed systems, dev environments, observability, and API documentation - the platform craft beneath every product you ship.
One page that ties the Engineering Path together - every article sorted by layer (orchestration, observability, API documentation), with a one-line reason and three reading orders for different readers.
Read it →The full walk-through - the AppHost, ServiceDefaults, the Dashboard, and the multi-language story behind Aspire's growth beyond .NET.
Read it →The internals teardown - the application model, the Developer Control Plane that runs it, and the run-vs-publish split. The advanced follow-on to What is Aspire?
Read it →The infographic-driven companion piece - three pain points distributed development hits without orchestration, and three fixes Aspire ships out of the box.
Read it →The clarification piece - Aspire is local orchestration with cloud-ready config, not a deployment platform. Where the framework's responsibility ends and yours begins.
Read it →The configuration recipe - local Redis container, real Azure SQL and Storage via AddConnectionString, User Secrets for the credentials. Cloud-connected development without spinning everything up locally.
The two ways containers show up in an Aspire app - dependencies it runs for you locally (Docker or Podman) and the images your own services ship as. AddContainer, lifetimes, and AddDockerfile.
Read it →The engine underneath - how Aspire finds Docker or Podman, the Docker-compatible socket, switching between them, and the rootless gotchas (ports, volumes) that actually bite.
Read it →The core app-model distinction - resources Aspire runs and owns versus ones that live outside and are only wired in. It decides what shows in the dashboard, what gets a connection string, and what you can swap in one line.
Read it →The recipe - declare an Azure SQL resource in the app model, then run it as a local SQL Server container in development. One model, two runtimes, no subscription to pay for.
Read it →The recipe - provision a Redis container in your AppHost and read and write through it from your service, with the connection wired in for you and no connection string to manage.
Read it →The Windows Subsystem for Linux - a real Linux environment running on Windows with no dual boot or full VM. WSL 1 vs WSL 2, the install, the two file systems, and where it fits.
Read it →The ability to understand what is happening inside a running system by reading its external outputs - logs, metrics, and traces. The three pillars and why distributed systems need all of them.
Read it →The modern, open-source API reference UI built on OpenAPI - clean two-pane layout, a real HTTP client, multi-language code samples, and the docs experience ASP.NET Core 9 made its default.
Read it →The side-by-side - two tools that turn an OpenAPI spec into browsable docs. What each one is, how they compare on UI, footprint, and ecosystem, and when to pick which.
Read it →