Dapr .NET SDK Development with .NET Aspire

Learn about local development with .NET Aspire

.NET Aspire

.NET Aspire is a development tool designed to make it easier to include external software into .NET applications by providing a framework that allows third-party services to be readily integrated, observed and provisioned alongside your own software.

Aspire simplifies local development by providing rich integration with popular IDEs including Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, JetBrains Rider and others to launch your application with the debugger while automatically launching and provisioning access to other integrations as well, including Dapr.

While Aspire also assists with deployment of your application to various cloud hosts like Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, deployment is currently outside the scope of this guide. More information can be found in Aspire’s documentation here.

An end-to-end demonstration featuring the following and demonstrating service invocation between multiple Dapr-enabled services can be found here.

Prerequisites

Both the Dapr .NET SDK and .NET Aspire are compatible with .NET 8 or .NET 9
An OCI compliant container runtime such as Docker Desktop or Podman
Install and initialize Dapr v1.16 or later

Using .NET Aspire via CLI

We’ll start by creating a brand new .NET application. Open your preferred CLI and navigate to the directory you wish to create your new .NET solution within. Start by using the following command to install a template that will create an empty Aspire application:

dotnet new install Aspire.ProjectTemplates

Once that’s installed, proceed to create an empty .NET Aspire application in your current directory. The -n argument allows you to specify the name of the output solution. If it’s excluded, the .NET CLI will instead use the name of the output directory, e.g. C:\source\aspiredemo will result in the solution being named aspiredemo. The rest of this tutorial will assume a solution named aspiredemo.

dotnet new aspire -n aspiredemo

This will create two Aspire-specific directories and one file in your directory:

aspiredemo.AppHost/ contains the Aspire orchestration project that is used to configure each of the integrations used in your application(s).
aspiredemo.ServiceDefaults/ contains a collection of extensions meant to be shared across your solution to aid in resilience, service discovery and telemetry capabilities offered by Aspire (these are distinct from the capabilities offered in Dapr itself).
aspiredemo.sln is the file that maintains the layout of your current solution

We’ll next create twp projects that’ll serve as our Dapr application and demonstrate Dapr functionality. From the same directory, use the following to create an empty ASP.NET Core project called FrontEndApp and another called ‘BackEndApp’. Either one will be created relative to your current directory in FrontEndApp\FrontEndApp.csproj and BackEndApp\BackEndApp.csproj, respectively.

dotnet new web --name FrontEndApp

Next we’ll configure the AppHost project to add the necessary package to support local Dapr development. Navigate into the AppHost directory with the following and install the CommunityToolkit.Aspire.Hosting.Dapr package from NuGet into the project.

We’ll also add a reference to our FrontEndApp project so we can reference it during the registration process.

This package was previously called Aspire.Hosting.Dapr, which has been marked as deprecated.

cd aspiredemo.AppHost
dotnet add package CommunityToolkit.Aspire.Hosting.Dapr
dotnet add reference ../FrontEndApp/
dotnet add reference ../BackEndApp/

Next, we need to configure Dapr as a resource to be loaded alongside your project. Open the Program.cs file in that project within your preferred IDE. It should look similar to the following:

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Build().Run();

If you’re familiar with the dependency injection approach used in ASP.NET Core projects or others utilizing the Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection functionality, you’ll find that this will be a familiar experience.

Because we’ve already added a project reference to MyApp, we need to start by adding a reference in this configuration as well. Add the following before the builder.Build().Run() line:

var backEndApp = builder
    .AddProject<Projects.BackEndApp>("be")
    .WithDaprSidecar();

var frontEndApp = builder
    .AddProject<Projects.FrontEndApp>("fe")
    .WithDaprSidecar();

Because the project reference has been added to this solution, your project shows up as a type within the Projects. namespace for our purposes here. The name of the variable you assign the project to doesn’t much matter in this tutorial but would be used if you wanted to create a reference between this project and another using Aspire’s service discovery functionality.

Adding .WithDaprSidecar() configures Dapr as a .NET Aspire resource so that when the project runs, the sidecar will be deployed alongside your application. This accepts a number of different options and could optionally be configured as in the following example:

DaprSidecarOptions sidecarOptions = new()
{
    AppId = "how-dapr-identifies-your-app",
    AppPort = 8080, //Note that this argument is required if you intend to configure pubsub, actors or workflows as of Aspire v9.0 
    DaprGrpcPort = 50001,
    DaprHttpPort = 3500,
    MetricsPort = 9090
};

builder
    .AddProject<Projects.BackEndApp>("be")
    .WithReference(myApp)
    .WithDaprSidecar(sidecarOptions);

As indicated in the example above, as of .NET Aspire 9.0, if you intend to use any functionality in which Dapr needs to call into your application such as pubsub, actors or workflows, you will need to specify your AppPort as a configured option as Aspire will not automatically pass it to Dapr at runtime. It’s expected that this behavior will change in a future release as a fix has been merged and can be tracked here.

Finally, let’s add an endpoint to the back-end app that we can invoke using Dapr’s service invocation to display to a page to demonstrate that Dapr is working as expected.

When you open the solution in your IDE, ensure that the aspiredemo.AppHost is configured as your startup project, but when you launch it in a debug configuration, you’ll note that your integrated console should reflect your expected Dapr logs and it will be available to your application.