In this chapter, you need .NET 8 with the .NET Aspire workload, either Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code, Docker Desktop, and a Microsoft Azure subscription. Information about the installation is explained in this chapter and the readme file of the source code repository.

The code for this chapter can be found in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Pragmatic-Microservices-with-CSharp-and-Azure.

In the ch01 folder, you’ll see the projects with the results of this chapter. You’ll see these folders:

• Aspire: This folder contains four projects created with a .NET Aspire template to run a .NET Aspire project including one service and a web application
• Azure: This folder contains the same four projects from the previous folder, enhanced by using an Azure resource

.NET Aspire is a new .NET technology offering tools and libraries that help create, debug, and deploy .NET solutions built using microservices. With all the chapters of this book, we’ll take advantage of .NET Aspire.

Note

In this chapter, you’ll get a core understanding of how .NET Aspire works. In all the other chapters, we’ll make use of .NET Aspire and get into the details.

You can install it using the .NET Command Line Interface (CLI) or using Visual Studio 2022. The first version of .NET Aspire is based on .NET 8, thus at least .NET 8 is required to use .NET Aspire.

.NET Aspire requires .NET 8, and can be installed by installing a .NET workload:

dotnet workload install aspire

To see the workloads installed, and the version of .NET Aspire, use the following:

dotnet workload list

If you use Visual Studio, use the Visual Studio Installer, and select the .NET Aspire SDK component to install .NET Aspire.

.NET...

The Codebreaker solution is a traditional game to solve a set of colors. With one game type, the player needs to place four colors (which can be duplicates) from a list of six different colors. The correct colors are chosen randomly by the game service. With every move the player makes, an answer is returned: for every color that is correct and positioned at the correct place, a black peg is returned. For every color that is correct but wrongly positioned, a white peg is returned. The player now has up to 12 moves to find the correct solution. Figure 1.4 shows a game run using a Blazor client application.

Figure 1.4 – Blazor client application

This gameplay shows that the solution was found after five moves. In this case, the correct result was yellow – black – red – black. The first selection was red – green – blue – yellow, with a result of two white pegs. With the fifth...

To create and run the code from this book, you also need to have an Azure subscription. You can activate Microsoft Azure for free at https://azure.microsoft.com/free, which gives you an amount of about $200 Azure credits that are available for the first 30 days and several services that can be used for free for the time after.

What many developers miss is that if you have a Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription, you also have a free amount of Azure resources every month. You just need to activate this with your Visual Studio subscription: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/subscriptions/.

To create and manage resources, we use the Azure Portal, the Azure CLI, and the Azure Developer CLI. On Windows, you can install them with the following:

winget install Microsoft.AzureCLI
winget install Microsoft.Azd

To install these tools on Mac and Linux, check https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli and https://learn.microsoft...

In this chapter, you learned about the core features of .NET Aspire, which includes tooling, orchestration, and Aspire components. You learned how resources are connected by the Aspire app model, and how service discovery is done. You’ve seen how to create a manifest describing the app model, which can be used by tools to deploy the solution.

With the Codebreaker solution, you learned about the rules of the game and the parts of the application that are created from the second to the last chapter.

Now, you know the different Microsoft Azure services that are used by the Codebreaker solution when running in Azure. An alternative to these services is offered as well to run the complete solution in an on-premises environment (which can also be hosted in the Azure cloud this way).

From the next chapter on, we’ll start developing the Codebreaker solution. In Chapter 2, we will create REST services using ASP.NET Core minimal APIs to play games. We’ll...

To learn more about the topics discussed in this chapter, you can refer to the following links:

• .NET Aspire setup and tooling: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals/setup-tooling
• .NET Aspire components: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals/components-overview
• .NET Aspire manifest format: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/deployment/manifest-format
• GitHub repository for Aspir8: https://github.com/prom3theu5/aspirational-manifests