Automatic instance deletion - I'm always running multiple shell instances and often I'll forget I already had aspire running somewhere else. This new feature will let me run aspire again from anywhere and stop the other instance instead of getting an error!
If you are using Aspire and EF core to manage the schema of your database, this documentation is a great starting place to make the two work together.
The core concept is that you add a worker service that is dedicated to running migrations, creating the initial database, and seeding data to the database. Essentially any operation that should be performed before the actual web app starts up. I implemented this in the blog this evening with the help of Claude Code while I watched Twin Peaks.
One prerequisite was that I had to move my DbContext and Entity classes to a shared library so that the web app and worker services could both access them. I had actually tried to do this when I first created the blog but ran into issues and decided to simplify the design. I first told Claude to separate out the database entities, migrations, and contexts to a separate project. I was surprised how long this actually took. But in the end, something like 20+ files were touched, but all tests passed and the changes looked good.
Next, I started a new chat with Claude (/new command), and gave it the same link provided in this post.
Follow the instructions at the following url to automatically apply migrations when running locally: https://aspire.dev/integrations/databases/efcore/migrations/
13 is bigger than 10 and less than 14 and is a prime number. The versioning scheme signifies a break away from .NET versioning and a direction change in the product to be evergreen (latest version is what matters) and going polyglot
I've updated this blog to Aspire 9.3. This particular release didn't have anything that I wanted to use right away, but this being such a simple blog website, it doesn't really need many of the fancy deployment features, especially since I deploy to Heroku and not Azure.
If I find any features I can use in the coming days, I'll create another post to highlight those.
I'm always excited when I see a new .NET Aspire release. The 9.2 update has lots of small quality-of-life improvements. The most interesting new feature for me is "Automatic database creation support". This means that if you add a Postgres database, it will get automatically created, but the best part is that you can also provide a custom SQL script. This lets you customize the creation. I might use this to seed the database with some fake data, so I don't have to manually create data.
This project is showing really great promise. The team is actively listening to developer feedback and reacting to it quickly.
Spent my free time adding image support to the blog today. I'm using Azure Storage accounts, as it's what I know, and I did not feel like diving into S3 buckets right now, although I probably should at some point.
Once again, .NET Aspire proved its usefulness. I kicked off the changes by adding the Azure Storage hosting and client integrations via Aspire, then added a Minimal API POST endpoint so I had a place to upload the images to. GitHub Copilot is very useful in these kinds of tasks. I can write a comment block describing what I want the endpoint to do, all the edge cases I think it should handle, then hit tab and get 90% of what I wanted. I go through and tweak the rest, then I'm testing almost immediately.
The last piece of the puzzle was hooking up my new endpoint to the Trix editor. Fortunately, the Trix dev team provided a nice Javascript file to show how to hook up the event listeners and use an XHR object to post the image back to the server. Considering my lack of experience with Javascript, I was ecstatic to get this working in only a few iterations.
I edited my last post to add a picture from my bike ride, so I know it's working, but I better add one to this post too :)
I'm very excited about this release of .NET Aspire. It's an absolute game changer for me, specifically in doing dev work on this blog.
This release has a bunch of great stuff, but I'm actually only interested in the bug fix to this issue. I really love the `dotnet watch run` command, which will perform a hot reload of your application when you make changes to the source files. Before this bug fix, sockets would not be freed up in a timely manner if the process ends, meaning that on reload, it would try to rebind to the existing ports and fail. This meant my workflow was 1. make a change 2. kill the running process 3. wait 10-15 seconds 4. run dotnet run again. Sometimes, I would have to rinse and repeat 3 and 4, if I hadn't waited long enough.
Now, I run `dotnet watch run`, make changes to my code (.cs, .css, and .razor files), and all I have to do to see the new changes is refresh my browser page. It's like magic. My dev loop has gone from ~30 seconds to see the changes reflected in the browser to near-instantly (the time it takes me to press F5 in Safari).
I've been very happy with .NET Aspire so far. But because I deploy to Heroku and not Azure, I can't take advantage of any of the deployment features. A side project I've been thinking about is to build a Heroku deployer based on a .NET aspire deployment manifest.
