August 29th, 2024

Announcing .NET Aspire 8.2 – Goodbye Components, Hello Integrations!

Maddy Montaquila
Senior Product Manager

.NET Aspire 8.2 is shipping today, and you can download or update to today’s release now. While this release doesn’t introduce big new features like in .NET Aspire 8.1, it does improve onboarding, testing, and have other quality of life improvements.

Components have a new name!

One of the major changes you’ll notice in .NET Aspire 8.2 is that .NET Aspire Components are now called “Integrations”! A .NET Aspire Integration is a package that you add to your app that streamlines the process of setting up, starting up, and communicating with prominent cloud services and platforms.

Integrations are used in two ways in project using .NET Aspire:

  1. As a “Hosting” package added to your AppHost project, letting you easily spin up the resource and connect to it alongside your projects during local development.
  2. As a package in your app code, for connecting to the resource created in your AppHost, as well as streamlining setup and defaults to lower the burden of adding a new cloud service.

We originally named these “components” because… well… they’re components! But we’ve realized that it’s such an overloaded term in development that we were actually just confusing people (and ourselves). Our documentation has been updated to reflect the change to “Integrations” and we will be using that terminology in our content moving forward.

Testing, testing, and more testing

Another core part of this release has been strengthening our own system to handle how often Integrations are updated. Of course, one of the best ways to do that is… tests! The .NET Aspire team, along with some amazing community contributors, have been bolstering our suite of tests throughout this release so that we can quickly bump a version and make sure it isn’t going to break anything in your apps. A special thank you to our top contributors from the past month – @alirexaa, @davidebbo, and more – for all the great work you brought into 8.2 for us.

Catch up & join .NET Aspire events

Since the launch of .NET Aspire in May, together with the community we have had several event going deeper on development with .NET Aspire.

  • Let’s Learn .NET Aspire: A full 2 hour workshop broadcast live in 7 different languages around the world.
  • .NET Aspire Developers Day: A full day of .NET Aspire with the product team and community covering all things .NET Aspire with 14 total sessions!

Join us live on September 18th for Azure Developers – .NET Aspire Day where teams across Azure will be highlighting the latest for .NET Aspire developers for cloud development. Register for free today!

Breaking changes

One of the things we are working on for .NET Aspire 9.0 is to allow you to build .NET Aspire 9.0 projects without requiring the .NET Aspire Workload to be installed. We believe this will help in different scenarios, particularly for CI/CD scenarios where you may not want to install the workload on the build machine.

On the 8.2 release we made some progress towards that goal by moving some of the components that used to ship with the workload to separate packages that will get automatically referenced by your project. This change will be mostly transparent to you, but it does mean that in order to use .NET Aspire 8.2, you will need to make sure that you have the latest version of the workload installed as well as make sure that your AppHost project references the latest version of the Aspire.Hosting.AppHost package. Otherwise, you may see a build error similar to this:

xxx.AppHost is a .NET Aspire AppHost project that needs a package reference to Aspire.Hosting.AppHost version 8.2.0 or above to work correctly

To fix it, as the error message suggests, you can make sure that your AppHost project references the latest version of the Aspire.Hosting.AppHost package. You can do this by making sure your AppHost project file contains the following line:

<PackageReference Include="Aspire.Hosting.AppHost" Version="8.2.0" />

For more information on this change, you can read our pinned GitHub Issue.

Try it out and let us know your feedback 📣

We’re now turning our focus towards .NET Aspire 9.0, which ships at the same time as .NET 9, and would love to hear what YOU want to see in upcoming releases. Feel free to engage on our GitHub, fill out our survey, and visit our What’s New page in our docs to learn more and download today!

Author

Maddy Montaquila
Senior Product Manager

Maddy is a Product Manager focused on making .NET developers as productive as possible, from mobile apps to microservices ✨

9 comments

  • Jarem Archer

    Will there be support for Azure Functions soon?

  • David Cuccia

    Love it. The Aspire slogan should be "Move fast, without breaking things!" :)

    Just filled out the survey, but I'll share one of my suggestions here:

    Would be nice to have a SignalR integration, that abstracts the hub connection url/port across aspire components. Could be a SignalR server hosted by my app, or a stand-alone process/container. Yesterday, I wanted to share data between my Python ML app and my C#/Blazor front end, and now that I'm spoiled...

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  • Santhosh Reddy Vootukuri (SUNNY)Microsoft employee

    Awesome, kudos to the team.

    Integrations sound much better than components.

  • Emil Granbom · Edited

    I have big problems updating to version 8.2. When I run the command dotnet workload update the versions listed with dotnet workload list doesn't change. Visual Studio says that I need to update in order to build regardless of which version of the nuget packages I'm using. Basically I'm stuck and the same goes for our github action where we use dotnet workload restore to make sure everything is up to date. The restore just...

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  • Mike-E · Edited

    I have been spending some time here learning Aspire this week and it's been pretty decent. The friction I am encountering now is deploying to Azure. I have spent the past 3 years learning AppService and it doesn't seem that Aspire supports this, but rather only supports container apps. I am OK learning about this but it doesn't seem like any documentation is available around it. It's been quite the challenge...

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    • Maddy MontaquilaMicrosoft employee Author

      Hi! Thank you for the super detailed feedback - this is exactly the kind of thing we want to hear as we continue working on the deployment story. I will also pass along the deployment docs feedback. We are adding new docs all the time so I totally agree this is something we should do.
      As for App Service - you aren't the first person we've heard this from, but we're trying to get ACA...

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      • Mike-E

        Thank you for your response and support, it is appreciated. FWIW I have followed your suggestion and have created an issue here to track:
        https://github.com/dotnet/aspire/issues/5675

        (Sounds like this currently is not going to happen anytime soon, if ever)