Setting up a new developer on a distributed .NET project is usually a day-long saga of "Did you install Redis?" and "Check your environment variables." Aspire promises to fix that, but how does it actually feel to use day-to-day?

I’ve been experimenting with Aspire to see if it can truly simplify the local development experience for multi-service apps. This talk is a practical tour of my findings, focusing on the developer "inner loop."

What we'll cover:

- Orchestration without the Headache: How to use the AppHost to wire up services, databases, and caches without touching a single YAML file.

- Observability on Day One: Using the Aspire dashboard to actually see what’s happening between your services during local debugging.

- The Deployment Question: How Aspire-orchestrated apps can still be deployed to your existing infrastructure (even if you aren't ready for "Cloud Native" yet).

- What I Wish I Knew: The things that aren't in the documentation that will save you hours of troubleshooting.

Stop fighting your local environment and start shipping code. Let’s see if Aspire is the tool that finally makes distributed development feel "local" again.