.NET Aspire update includes AI debugging via GitHub Copilot

.NET Aspire 9.3, the latest version of Microsoft’s cloud-ready stack for building distributed applications, has been released. The current update leverages GitHub Copilot as an AI debugging assistant.

Introduced May 19 and billed as a minor release,.NET Aspire 9.3 makes AI-based Copilot available in the Aspire dashboard. Copilot supercharges the dashboard’s OpenTelemetry debugging and diagnostics experience, Microsoft said. Using AI, developers can review hundreds of log messages with a single click, investigate the root cause of errors across multiple applications, and highlight performance issues in traces. Developers also can explain obscure error codes using an AI knowledge repository. Access to Copilot in the dashboard comes from launching an app from the Visual Studio Code editor or Visual Studio IDE.

The updated version 9.3 dashboard also features a context menu providing quick access to the Resource Graph view. This menu makes it easier to access a resource’s telemetry, commands, and URLs, according to Microsoft. On the dashboard’s Traces page, meanwhile, the dashboard now can visualize outgoing calls to resources that do not emit their own telemetry. This includes caches, databases, and other infrastructure elements that lack built-in tracing. Having these dependencies visible on the Traces page helps developers understand the chain of dependencies in a call. Developers can filter results only to traces that include these external dependencies. The.NET Aspire 9.3 dashboard also has quality-of-life improvements including remembering the state of the source filter on the Resources page, preservation of friendly resource names in the console logs URL, and displaying a warning notification when metrics collection is paused.

Other improvements in.NET Aspire 9.3 include:

An integration for hosting a YARP (Yet Another Reverse Proxy) instance via the Aspire.Hosting.Yarp package.

Updates to the MySQL integration so it now creates the specified database when calling AddDatabase in AppHost. Postgres, Redis, and SQL Server integrations have also been enhanced with new APIs that make it easier to configure the port and password when using the RunAsContainer method.

Simplified access to with Azure Blob Storage, with developers able to create blob containers directly in the AppHost.

API updates to the Custom URLs feature to make it easier to customize resource URLs.