Dapr introduction & creating a distributed local dev env with .NET Aspire

Whether you're new to Dapr or looking to deepen your understanding, this meetup is the perfect opportunity to learn, network, and enhance your skills with practical knowledge you can take back to your projects.

Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) is an open-source, event-driven runtime that simplifies building resilient, scalable, and distributed applications. By offering building blocks like state management, service invocation, and publish/subscribe messaging, Dapr abstracts the complexities of microservices, empowering developers to focus on core logic without infrastructure concerns.

Please be aware, this meetup is in-person only, we won't run a livestream, but a recording will be provided after the event for people unable to attend. Please only RSVP if you intent to attend in person in Amsterdam. If you want to be made aware of when the recording is published follow us on YouTube or BlueSky.

We would like to thank our sponsor/host JetBrains for making this event possible.

Schedule:
18:00 doors open
18:00 - 18:45 walk-in, food & drink
18:45 - 19:00 welcome & introduction
19:00 - 20:00 Marc Duiker - Introduction to Dapr
20:00 - 21:00 Florian van Dillen - Creating a distributed local development environment with Dapr and .NET Aspire
21:00 - 21:45 socializing
21:45 doors closing

Marc Duiker
I ♥ Event-driven, Dev Communities, & Creative Coding
Marc is a Sr Developer Advocate at Diagrid with a strong focus on event-driven architectures. He loves helping developers to achieve more every day.

You might have seen Marc at a developer meetup or conference, since he's a regular speaker and event-organizer in the area of Dapr, Azure cloud, and serverless technologies. From 2019 to 2024 Marc received the Microsoft Azure MVP award for his community contributions.

In his spare time, Marc likes to give attention to the creative part of his brain. He likes to create pixel art (check out VSCode Pets), code visuals & music, and create an occasional retro game.

Creating a distributed local development environment with Dapr and .NET Aspire
As a .NET developer, you will have either built distributed apps or heard about them. Distributed apps, microservice or not, come with a new set of complexities that you previously didn't have to deal with. However, those complexities are easily embraced by setting up a good local development environment.

This is where Dapr and .NET Aspire come in.

Dapr allows you to abstract infrastructure away from your app code, allowing you to focus on writing your business logic and let Dapr deal with connecting to things like Message Brokers, State Stores and other services .NET Aspire then orchestrates all those dependencies during local development, connecting them all together seamlessly and then, during runtime, providing a single pane of glass to observe your applications' behaviour.

This session will show you how to set up your local environment, whether this is via Rider or Visual Studio. We will use a demo app to demonstrate the different abstractions that Dapr offers and how to integrate them with multiple services running locally on your development machine.

Then, we will explore the different ways in which Aspire collects logs, traces and metrics via OpenTelemetry. You can use this to see how your different services interact and where issues in your apps occur. We will even go as far as creating custom metrics and traces that will enhance the capabilities of OpenTelemetry even further.

Lastly, we will discuss what will happen when you deploy your application. There are multiple compute options that support Dapr natively, such as Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Container Apps. However, there are more options that we will also cover.

Florian van Dillen
Developer and Cloud Solution Architect at 4Dotnet
Full-stack software engineer at 4Dotnet, specialized in .NET and Azure. I like to work with event-driven systems and microservices, but also know my way around frontends, specifically Angular, React and Vue.

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