Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) is a CNCF project that provides capabilities to solve common concerns like service discovery, service-to-service communication, state management, configuration, secrets management, and others. It exposes APIs for each of these capabilities, allowing for easy integration with any language or runtime. This article discusses how Dapr can ease microservices development for developers and help to adopt standards and industry best practices into their technology stack. It also demonstrates how Visual Studio Code, aided by extensions, provides great support for developing Docker files, building container images, publishing them to container repositories, and deploying workloads on Kubernetes clusters like AKS. Overall, Dapr is a useful tool to solve the challenges of intercommunication among services and reduce dependency among teams, enabling higher velocity in rolling out features, thereby leading to faster time-to-market.