Running .NET Aspire inside a Dev Container gives you a reproducible, fully-tooled environment: Docker, .NET 9 SDK, Aspire CLI, and VS Code extensions—all preconfigured. No more “works on my machine.”

This post shows how to bootstrap an Aspire starter app and wire up a Dev Container so anyone can open the project and hit Run.

1) Create the starter app

dotnet new install Aspire.ProjectTemplates --force
dotnet new aspire-starter -n HelloAspire

You’ll get a solution with:

HelloAspire/
├─ HelloAspire.AppHost/          # Aspire orchestrator
├─ HelloAspire.ApiService/       # Minimal API
├─ HelloAspire.Web/              # Web frontend
├─ HelloAspire.ServiceDefaults/  # Shared defaults
└─ HelloAspire.sln

2) Add a Dev Container

Create .devcontainer/devcontainer.json:

// For format details, see https://aka.ms/devcontainer.json. For config options, see the
// README at: https://github.com/devcontainers/templates/tree/main/src/dotnet
{
  "name": ".NET Aspire",
  "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/dotnet:9.0-bookworm",
  "features": {
    "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/docker-in-docker:2": {},
    "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/powershell:1": {}
  },

  "hostRequirements": {
    "cpus": 8,
    "memory": "32gb",
    "storage": "64gb"
  },

  "onCreateCommand": "curl -sSL https://aspire.dev/install.sh | bash",
  "postStartCommand": "dotnet dev-certs https --trust",

  "customizations": {
    "vscode": {
      "extensions": [
        "ms-dotnettools.csdevkit",
        "GitHub.copilot-chat",
        "GitHub.copilot"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Continue reading “Developing .NET Aspire inside a Dev Container (VS Code)” →