dotnet
[New article]: Aspire Resource Model: Concepts, Design, and Authoring Guidance
Proposed topic or title
Aspire Resource Model: Concepts, Design, and Authoring Guidance
Location in table of contents.
fundamentals/resource-model
Reason for the article
Developers, integrators, and contributors building on Aspire need a deep understanding of the resource model that underpins distributed application development. Without a clear mental model, it's easy to misuse Aspire's APIs, flatten structured values too early, or create brittle application graphs. This article would fill a major gap by explaining Aspire’s fundamental concepts — resources, annotations, structured values, references, endpoint allocation — in one cohesive guide. It would prevent architectural mistakes and enable a wider audience to author custom resources, publishers, and tooling with confidence.
Article abstract
This article explains the Aspire Resource Model in depth, covering how distributed applications are expressed as graphs of inert resources, how metadata is layered through annotations, how structured references and values enable safe deferred evaluation, and how lifecycle orchestration works. Readers will learn how to properly model services, extend Aspire with custom resource types, manage dependencies, and author value providers and publishers that integrate cleanly with the Aspire ecosystem.
Relevant searches
No response
@IEvangelist I wrote this gist https://gist.github.com/davidfowl/b408af870d4b5b54a28bf18bffa127e1
I don't know if it should be a single doc, but it has all of the right content I think (I did lots of brain dumping and rewriting). It also contains https://github.com/dotnet/docs-aspire/issues/2340 so we can scrap that one.
cc @mitchdenny @eerhardt @captainsafia @aaronpowell @Alirexaa would love to get your feedback (and any other community toolkit members that have been building integrations).
