Is Your Local Dev Environment a Mess? How .NET Aspire Can Help

When

Thursday October 16^th, 2025 @ 5:30 PM

Who

Aaron Stannard

Where

SmartDraw Software

RSVP

If you follow any of Microsoft’s big personalities on social media you might get the impression that .NET Aspire was curing cancer, proving P=NP, and on the verge of delivering sustainable nuclear fusion power.

It’s not, not even close.

But it is a tremendous improvement in developer productivity for local development, integration testing… and maybe one day in the future, deployments.

In this talk we’re going to use .NET Aspire to:

1. Streamline local development: wire up your applications along with all of its real dependencies, so F5 ”just works” and launches a full, ready-to-debug instance of your app without any shared databases or other resources.
2. Integration test without mocks: why use fake testing utilities when you can just run your real application and really test against it using Aspire.Hosting.Testing?
3. Experiment with local deployments: the aspire CLI and the deployment model are the most experimental parts of Aspire, but we’re going to look at them and see what the future holds.

.NET Aspire can help get rid of the awful rats’ nest of shared databases, missing functionality, and configuration hell that most production code bases settle for - and instead deliver a git clone > dotnet run experience out of the box.

Code Samples

• https://github.com/petabridge/DrawTogether.NET
• https://github.com/akkadotnet/Akka.Streams.Kafka/tree/dev/examples/Simple

Food / Drinks

Food and drinks will be provided! Please contact us (on meetup) if you have any dietary restrictions/food allergies.

Directions and Parking Instructions

Meeting will be held in the offices of SmartDraw Software, 1780 Hughes Landing Blvd #1100 on the 11th floor.