In’t the future I will write a blog post about exploring .NET Aspire and the new Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries. These technologies are shaping the future of cloud-native .NET development and AI integration and seem like a great way to spend time writing .NET code that is going to be very useful. I also intend to force myself to use Github Copilot as much as possible to help me both create the solution but also explain the technology as I go along.

Objectives

  • Learn AI assisted development
    • Spec driven development
    • Vibe-coding impressions
    • Github Copilot Agent mode
  • Practise modern .NET (8 or 8)
  • Learn and internalise .NET Aspire 9.x
  • Double down on containerisation and use of dev containers for development environment dependencies
  • Start learning Microsoft.Extensions.AI and perhaps Semantic Kernel
  • Start learning about running different models
  • Seed the imagination of introducing AI functionality into applications with real value other than just chatbots.

The rest of the content below was generated by AI ;-)

Getting Started with .NET Aspire

.NET Aspire provides orchestration and cloud-native patterns for .NET applications. Setting up a sample project was straightforward, and the documentation is improving rapidly.

Exploring Microsoft.Extensions.AI

The Microsoft.Extensions.AI package brings powerful AI capabilities directly into .NET apps. I experimented with some of the new APIs for chat and analytics, and the integration felt seamless.

Steve Sanderson’s Samples

A big help in my learning journey was Steve Sanderson’s recent samples. His code examples and walkthroughs made it much easier to understand how to wire up AI services and orchestrate them with Aspire.

Next Steps

I’m planning to build a small demo app that combines Aspire orchestration with AI-powered features, inspired by Steve’s approach. Stay tuned for more updates!