.NET Aspire and Dapr are well-suited technologies to build distributed systems, each with its own strengths and challenges. But how do you choose which one to use? Can, or should, they be used together?

We have been building a distributed application using these two technologies ever since .NET Aspire was on Preview 2. In this session I will share our successes and our failures. By the end you will have a good idea whether or not this combination, or just one of the two technologies, are a good fit for your project.

We will go beyond the typical "getting started" demo that only shows the shiny new things. Promises like easy deployment with 'azd up' didn't hold up against the large enterprise that was our customer. We fought against breaking changes between versions, company politics, bugs, dependencies, ....

Gather around folks, I've got some war stories to share with you.