Might wanna give it another go as Aspire was in preview at the time the article was written. Secondly, smaller systems are perfect for this - but to test an entire system can you not create a "meta" repo that pulls in submodules w/ all the microservices needed for the test? Then use Aspire to orchestrate all of those? It's something I have done myself. In any case - now that Aspire went GA I'm loving it!!!! Hopefully your experience will better the next time around! Thanks for the article!

My thoughts exactly. I love Aspire and use it for all my projects including big projects with many services. Perhaps the author would review it again after it's formal release.

Some feedback on the authors experience and comments:

I do still use one big solution, but have that in a separate git repo that has all of my smaller repos as submodules with each having it's own solution.

As for the need for 2 projects, that's true, but not an issue. Many projects have shared libraries and you could include the code from the ServiceDefaults library there instead of adding yet another project, since.

Also, I think you might have misunderstood the purpose of Aspire. It is not trying to be like Kubernetes and instead provides a way to test locally and to generate manifests that other tools can use to deploy a solution. There are of course first-party, built-in deployment tools for Azure Container Apps, but there are also third-party tools to generate helm or Kubernetes definitions.

As for your experience using it under Ubuntu, I cannot speak to that. But I have had a very good experience using Aspire on Windows with Rider.

I do agree that the dotnet workload system is a mess. With meta packages being deployed before their dependant packages leading to install and/or update failures. The .NET team is exploring improvements to NuGet to potentially resolve these issues however.