Your application depends Databases, message brokers, external APIs. To test your application in full these all need to be available. Creating and environment for development, CI, or other testing can be difficult, leading to brittle startup scripts and failures that are hard to reproduce. But with Aspire you can build stable and trustworthy environments.

In this session, I'll demonstrate how I use .NET Aspire as a test harness. Using an application with a frontend, API, database, and external services. We'll launch the system, execute tests, and tear it down again. I'll share the good stuff and the things to avoid. The demos include scenarios showcasing BDD, observability, debugging, database management, playwright, pipeline integration, and how AI can use this setup as well.

You will leave with a practical example and a bunch of inspiration to test your own application with Aspire.

.NET developers who build applications with external dependencies and want a consistent approach to full-stack testing across local development and CI. Basic familiarity with .NET Aspire and automated testing is helpful but not required.