Over the last weeks, I’ve seen many questions from the .NET community on how .NET Aspire compares to Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime. Some say the features appear to be very similar and think Aspire is a replacement for Dapr (which it isn’t). The TL;DR is: .NET Aspire is a set of tools for local development, while Dapr is a runtime offering building block APIs and is used during local development and running in production. This article covers both .NET Aspire and Dapr, the problems they solve, their differences, and why .NET developers should use them together when building distributed applications that can run on any cloud. 

What Problem Does .NET Aspire Solve?

.NET Aspire was created to solve a problem that many distributed application developers face: running and debugging multiple cloud native apps locally. .NET developers can now use a language they understand well, C#, to configure their microservices and infrastructure dependencies, such as state stores and message brokers. Developers can run and debug their .NET applications using Visual Studio or VS Code with the C# Dev Kit extension.