Aspire 13.0 marks a major milestone, not just for the product, but for the vibrant community that helped shape it. This release includes meaningful contributions from community members across features, integrations, tooling, and documentation. We wanted to highlight some standout PRs from this release as a way to say thanks, and hopefully inspire more of you to join us!

Notable Community Contributions in Aspire 13.0 🛠️

Your contributions helps shape the future of Aspire and benefit the entire community. Here are a few community-led PRs that made a real difference in Aspire 13.0:

App Service Enhancements

Enhancing App Service support improves deployment, runtime reliability, scalability, observability, and monitoring for hosted applications.

Author: @ShilpiRach

• Add support to enable automatic scaling for App Service Environment
  Adds a WithAutomaticScaling extension method for Azure App Service Environments, allowing developers to configure elastic scaling of app service plans and reduce cold-start issues.

• Added support for Aspire dashboard in App Service
  Enables Aspire dashboard metrics and status for applications deployed to Azure App Service.

• Added check for single exposed port and handle startup command and target port in app service
  Introduces a WithClientConnectionStringSecret method to automatically register client connection strings as secret parameters, improving security and simplifying configuration.

• Added support for enabling Application Insights for App Service
  Turns on Application Insights by default for Azure App Service scenarios, ensuring telemetry and monitoring for hosted Aspire applications.

Kusto Improvements for Faster, More Reliable Workflows

Streamlining workflows lets developers focus on building features instead of managing infrastructure.

Author: @MattKotsenas

• Update default Kusto emulator db creation script to be persistent
  Makes the Kusto emulator database persistent, fixing cursor tracker errors, adding streaming ingestion, resilience retries, and internal helpers for database creation and control.

• Update retry in Kusto emulator actions to handle any non-permanent error
  Refactors the Kusto database resilience pipeline, handling exceptions with shorter timeouts, more retries, and exponential backoff for improved reliability.

• Remove memory limit from Kusto emulator
  Removes the default memory limit to prevent errors on large queries or ingestion, adding tests to cover default emulator settings.

• Move all Kusto types into Aspire.Hosting.Azure namespace
  Aligns Kusto types with Azure package conventions by moving them to the Aspire.Hosting.Azure namespace.

Custom Claims & Dashboard Enhancements

Author: @WeihanLi

• Improve performance of Aspire caching
  Adds support for configuring additional claim actions in the OpenID Connect pipeline, enabling developers to map custom claims via new DashboardOptions.

Shout-Out to NEW Community Contributors 🎉

A huge thank you to everyone contributing for the first time! Your work, bug fixes, feature enhancements, or documentation, made this release better.

• @jomaxso — Add WithChildRelationship methods for parent-child relationships
  Adds WithChildRelationship overloads to define parent-child resource relationships from the parent, improving API clarity and consistency.

• @yreynhout — Support for .fsproj, .vbproj project files next to .csproj
  Expands cross-language support in Aspire, handling .fsproj and .vbproj files alongside .csproj, enabling teams using F# or VB.NET to benefit fully.

• @foxminchan — Update Qdrant logo image to a new version
  Updates the Qdrant logo in Aspire to match new branding.

• @jguadagno — Queue document update
  Improves documentation for clarity and correctness.

Thank you to all contributors who helped make Aspire 13.0 a reality. From integrations and dashboards to templates, samples, and bug fixes, your work is helping developers build, observe, and deploy modern cloud apps faster and more reliably. Explore more community contributions.

Showcasing Aspire at .NET Conf

We would love to see more community-led sessions at our next conference — if you present Aspire at an event, let us know! Special thanks to the real-world Aspire community users who had the opportunity to demonstrate how Aspire helps .NET developers during .NET Conf.

• Alex Crome: Aspire for Modern Cloud Apps
• Russell Harding: Building Cloud-Native Apps with Aspire
• David Gardiner: Aspire in .NET Developer Workflows

You can browse other .NET conf community sessions on the dotnet YouTube channel.

How to Get Involved

Ready to contribute? Get started here:

• Visit the Aspire GitHub repo and check issues labeled good first issue or help wanted.
• Explore the Aspire Community Toolkit for community-maintained integrations and extensions.
• Join the conversation on aspire.dev or Discord to connect with maintainers and contributors.

Even small contributions — filing issues, documentation tweaks, writing blogs, or fixing a bug — help us build a stronger, more inclusive Aspire community. Thank you!