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One Day, One Goal: Building a Demo with Microsoft Aspire Framework

  • Writer: Richard Parkins
    Richard Parkins
  • Apr 14
  • 3 min read

Updated: Apr 24


🚀 The set-up


The technical team at Talent have long been coming together to collaborate and share knowledge on areas of tech we have been exposed to both personally and within our individual client projects.


Its been a while since we shared some of what we do with the wider public and this is our inaugural post for 2025! So this month we all got together virtually to look at a technology that our technical architect Pablo had been working on in his own time around a framework Microsoft has developed to give a better developer experience for all of us technologists that have the same issues, building and employing services locally


🛠️ What is Microsoft Aspire?


Microsoft Aspire is a new opinionated, full-stack framework built on .NET, aimed at simplifying cloud-native development. It handles things like service discovery, environment configuration, telemetry, and deployment—all while keeping the developer experience clean and productive.

It’s perfect for microservice-based applications and gave us the scaffolding we needed to get moving quickly on this tech hackathon day!


💡 The Idea

The team wanted to showcase the full stack of Aspire in action—services talking to each other, telemetry flowing, and everything bundled up in a clean developer experience.


So over the previous month of community-of-practice meet-ups we scoped our challenge:


  • One frontend (Blazor or React)

  • Backend services, maybe with the scaffolded default weather API's

  • A database of sorts

  • One or multiple Aspire orchestration project to wire it all together


Our tech architect demoed the application the the wider team to allow us hit the ground running. We employed mobbing as a pattern of developing the application on the day, with keyboard duties pass along every 30 minutes to allow us all to contribute. (Our dev-ops resources were employed during the day by creating governance and best practice on managing our Azure tenancy ready for GCLOUD 13)


⚙️ Tech Stack


As predominately public sector (DfE, Ofsted and Insolvenacy) resources we chose to keep on the tech stack of Microsoft we know and love !


  • .NET Aspire Framework for orchestration and service-to-service wiring

  • Minimal APIs for the backend services

  • PostgreSQL for persistence

  • Blazor for the frontend

  • OpenTelemetry & Application Insights for monitoring

  • Docker for containerisation (should we need it)

  • GitHub Actions for CI/CD


🧑‍💻 The Build

We started by scaffolding our project with the Aspire starter template:

dotnet new aspire-app -n DemoApp

From there, we added:

  • A backend service for managing resources

  • A shared project for contracts and models

  • A Blazor frontend to consume the APIs


The real magic happened in the Aspire orchestrator project where everything was registered and composed together.



🔍 Observability Built-in


Aspire's tight integration with OpenTelemetry gave us instant metrics, logs, and traces. We could trace a frontend button click all the way through to a database call in ProductsService.

No extra config. Just add the NuGet packages and register your services—it just works.



🧠 Lessons Learned


  • The Aspire Dashboard is 🔥 – It gave us a visual, real-time overview of all our services and their health status.

  • Minimal APIs + Aspire is a power combo – You can build fast and stay organized.

  • Telemetry is not an afterthought – With Aspire, it’s baked in from the start.

  • You can build something meaningful in one day – Especially with the right tools.


✅ Next Steps


  • Add authentication and authorisation via Microsoft Entra ID

  • Deploy to Azure App Services with GitHub Actions

  • Replace PostgreSQL with Azure Cosmos DB for scalability

  • Invite more teams to try Aspire in similar one-day sprints


💬 Final Thoughts


Microsoft Aspire felt like a natural evolution for .NET developers building cloud-native systems. The framework took care of the plumbing so we could focus on building features and shipping code.

We’re excited to see where Aspire goes next—and we encourage other teams to try a one-day build. You might be surprised how far you can get.


🖇️ Check out the full details on this cracking framework here



 
 
 

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