At the end of the last month, Microsoft released Aspire 13.2, bringing a broad set of updates to its cloud-native development stack. The release focuses on improving the command-line experience, expanding multi-language support, and making local development easier for both developers and AI coding agents.
The most notable addition in this release is a significant expansion of the Aspire CLI. As reported, developers can now run applications in the background using a new detached mode, manage running instances with dedicated start, stop, and process listing commands, and monitor resources directly from the terminal.
# Create a new starter with the interactive template picker
aspire new
# Or, create a new blank apphost in an existing codebase
aspire init
# Restores integration packages and starts the apphost
aspire run
# Manually restore integrations
aspire restore
A new isolated mode was also introduced to allow multiple instances of the same application to run side by side without port conflicts, which is particularly useful for automated testing and parallel workflows. The CLI also gained commands for managing secrets, certificates, diagnostics, and documentation access.
Another key feature in Aspire 13.2 is the preview of TypeScript AppHost support. Developers can now define their application's resource graph in TypeScript instead of C#, using the same underlying model of resources, references, and integrations. As explained, the TypeScript AppHost communicates with Aspire's orchestration host through a local transport layer and is supported in both the CLI and the VS Code extension.
The Aspire dashboard received several improvements as well. Users can now export and import telemetry data, export environment variables as .env files, and set resource parameters directly through the dashboard interface.
A new telemetry HTTP API was also added, enabling programmatic access to spans, logs, and traces. The resource graph layout was improved as stated, for better readability, and several general interface refinements were made.
On the integrations side, the Docker Compose publishing integration moved from prerelease to stable status. The release also introduced Microsoft Foundry support, replacing the earlier Azure AI Foundry integration, along with new integrations for Azure Virtual Network, Azure Data Lake Storage, and MongoDB Entity Framework Core. JavaScript projects gained Bun support as a package manager option.
The VS Code extension received over 20 feature additions, including a dedicated Aspire panel in the Activity Bar, inline CodeLens for resource state, and improved debugging capabilities for Azure Functions and TypeScript apphosts.
Other changes in this release include contextual endpoint resolution APIs, enhanced debugging attributes for core types, Kubernetes publishing fixes, and various Azure deployment improvements.
Lastly, the release also includes several breaking changes related to configuration files, resource commands, event handling, and the Azure AI Foundry to Microsoft Foundry transition.
For interested readers, the full release notes are available at the official Microsoft documentation.