Dapr promises portable distributed application building blocks. Aspire promises a streamlined local developer experience for cloud-native applications. Combined, they form a powerful platform for building observable, event-driven microservices without drowning in infrastructure complexity.

In this session, we’ll start with a quick introduction to Aspire and set up a distributed application from scratch. From there, we’ll explore the core Dapr concepts: the sidecar architecture, building blocks, and components. You’ll see how Aspire makes it easy to enable Dapr on services and orchestrate everything locally with minimal setup.

Using practical demos, we’ll walk through Dapr Pub/Sub messaging, state management with a state store, and service observability using OpenTelemetry. Along the way, we’ll discuss how these patterns help teams build resilient, maintainable distributed systems while keeping developers productive.

By the end of the session, you’ll understand how Aspire and Dapr complement each other, how to get started quickly, and how to apply these patterns in real-world .NET applications.