Idea: HTTP and MCP Client built into the dashboard

[g-martin772]

I know this is kind of big, but I thought why not post it here. What about adding a capable web client for common protocols and concepts like HTTP Rest and GraphQl, grpc and now also MCP. In my workflow I end up copying over a lot of info from tool like the dashboard to other client tools (urls/endpoints, keys and secrets, etc.) and then going back to aspire to inspect the trace of that request, that i first have to find of course. So I thought, why not integrate this, imagine Aspire know your api spec from the api document your app exports and picks it up automatically, it also knows how to authenticate with this service, you submit a request and immediately see the trace for that request and everything that is going on in the backend. Also I don't know the exact plan of this but I am also thinking about making aspire the central management hub for MCP Servers across the entire solution and being able to neetly track what each ai agent and mcp tool is doing in the background with the capability of dropping in half way to manually execute specific tools or promt the agent and also see the corresponding open telemetry trace for that. Is this totally outside the scope of aspire or is this something that might be considered?

[g-martin772]

Like a swagger ui for your entire distributed cloud app on steroids.

[davidfowl]

Too expensive to maintain long term. The Aspire team does not want to be the team that owns these extensions in the dashboard (as cool as it would be). They would stagnate. Our strategy is to integrate with and auto configure tools to connect to other resources by default. This scales way better than trying to build complex UI to interact with new protocols as they come out when the community is already builing tools that serve the same purpose.

To that end there's a scalar integration for aspire https://guides.scalar.com/scalar/scalar-api-references/integrations/net-aspire for HTTP based on your openapi spec.

There's an McpInspector integration with the community toolkit https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/Aspire/tree/main/src/CommunityToolkit.Aspire.Hosting.McpInspector

There may be an interesting opportunity to light up our chat client to interact with MCP servers as well, but there's more thinking to do there.