Last week, Microsoft revealed the availability of the .NET Aspire - second preview. Preview 2 brings changes and improvements regarding the dashboard, hosting, components, Dapr, and many more. The .NET Aspire is a new cloud-native development stack announced by Microsoft and the .NET team back in November during the .NET Conf Event. .NET Aspire includes a selected set of components enhanced for cloud-native by including service discovery, telemetry, resilience, and health checks by default. More details about the initial release can be read in InfoQ coverage of .NET Aspire. Preview 2 brings a lot of improvements, regarding the dashboard, it has undergone significant improvements, consolidating all resource types such as details of the projects, executables, and containers into a unified Resources page in Preview 2 of the Aspire dashboard. Additionally, there are improvements for hosting and orchestration, containers now offer support for configuring arguments to be passed during startup using IResourceBuilder<ContainerResource>.WithArgs method. Furthermore, both containers and executables can reference other resources through endpoints, enabling service discovery configuration using the WithServiceBinding method. Also, the ability to add projects without a <ProjectReference /> has been introduced, providing flexibility in project structuring.
