aspire

This skill is a comprehensive guide to .NET Aspire, a code-first, polyglot toolchain for building observable, production-ready distributed applications orchestrated from a single AppHost project. It solves the problem of coordinating heterogeneous workloads (C#, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, Java, Rust, Bun, Deno, PowerShell) by treating the AppHost as a conductor that starts services, wires up service discovery, and watches for problems. The skill packages a main SKILL.md plus on-demand reference files covering the CLI, MCP server, integrations catalog, polyglot APIs, architecture, dashboard, deployment, testing, and troubleshooting.

Its capabilities span the Aspire lifecycle. It explains how to research Aspire documentation, including the Aspire MCP server's docs and integration lookup tools across CLI versions and Context7 or GitHub search as fallbacks. It documents installation and prerequisites (a .NET 10 SDK), CLI usage, AppHost orchestration, service discovery, integrations, the dashboard, and a detailed deployment reference. The deployment material shows how aspire publish generates artifacts for Docker Compose, Kubernetes manifests and Helm charts, Azure Container Apps Bicep, and Azure App Service, maps AppHost resource concepts to each target, and includes CI/CD examples for GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps plus Dev Container and Codespaces configuration.

The target users are .NET and polyglot developers building cloud-native, multi-service applications who want to create, run, debug, configure, deploy, or troubleshoot Aspire apps. The install and CI examples use the official aspire.dev install script piped to a shell, a documented vendor pattern; the skill itself is reference documentation and does not execute those commands on its own.