4.x "Upgrader"

[ajhrtmn]

I work for a place that has most of its infrastructure built upon 4.x and vb.net, and we are looking at a lot adding or augmenting how we do a lot of the things that Aspire provides, and are looking to incrementally upgrade it all out of 4.x, and since Aspire really feels like the future of the whole cloud service management/modern "cPanel" it would be really cool to be able to wrap our 4.x stuff in as elegantly as possible. Is this something that Aspire can already do and I'm not seeing it?

[davidfowl]

Yes, when running in visual studio, it supports launching .NET Framework applications, but there are caveats:

1. It won't work from the command line if the project isn't dotnet run compatible (AKA an SDK based project)
2. There's no deployment support (I could dive into the reasons for that).
3. Hosting integrations pass configuration to the application via environment variables (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals/integrations-overview#relationship-between-hosting-and-client-integrations), this is possible but not friendly to .NET Framework (especially ASP.NET) applications.
4. Client integrations do not work with .NET Framework
5. Open telemetry does not work out of the box.

Bright side:

There's been some community energy in this direction! https://github.com/CZEMacLeod/C3D.Extensions.Aspire?tab=readme-ov-file#c3dextensionsaspire

See also this discussion #4280

Good luck!