DevOps
Aspire is a powerful tool for developers but not well understood – and pure TypeScript AppHost may broaden its appeal
Microsoft has released Aspire 13.4, with the key feature being general availability of the TypeScript AppHost, as well as new integrations for Go, Bun, Blazor and WebAssembly.
An Aspire app running in development, coded in TypeScript
The company currently describes Aspire as a "code-first orchestration and observability layer for distributed applications" which makes it sound like some kind of service, but it is not. Developers use the Aspire CLI (command line interface) to model, develop and debug distributed applications, originally just for .NET, but now for a variety of languages, with TypeScript now first-class so that even the core Aspire file, called the AppHost, can be written in the language.Aspire can also deploy applications, though it is not a service that runs in production. Instead, developers add targets to an Aspire project to enable commands including publish, which builds the artifacts to be deployed, and deploy, which deploys the artifacts to the configured target, such as Azure container apps, Azure app service or Kubernetes. Other targets include Docker Compose, AWS services, and others via third-party integrations.
