.NET Aspire Interview Questions & Quick Review

Nitin Pandit
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This chapter is your go-to resource for quickly revisiting the core principles of .NET Aspire—perfect for interviews, tech discussions, or last-minute prep. To make revision easy and focused, we've divided the content into clearly labelled sections.

Beginner-Level Questions: To build your foundational understanding
Conceptual & Best Practices: Covering core concepts and architecture insights
Scenario-Based Questions: Real-world applications and troubleshooting scenarios
Code-Based Questions: Analyze and interpret key Aspire code snippets
Deployment & Testing: Practical guidance for CI/CD and cloud deployments

With 20 targeted questions and crisp answers, this structured chapter empowers you to confidently articulate your knowledge of .NET Aspire in any setting.

.NET

If you are new here, I would highly recommend checking out all the previous chapters for a better understanding of .NET Aspire.

Beginner-Level Questions

Question 1. What is .NET Aspire, and what problem does it aim to solve?

.NET Aspire is a cloud-native development stack by Microsoft that simplifies building, orchestrating, and observing microservice-based .NET applications. It streamlines service configuration, communication, and deployment.

Question 2. Explain the role of the AppHost project in .NET Aspire.

The AppHost serves as the main orchestration project. It wires up all services and dependencies, manages lifecycle, injects configs, and launches the Aspire Dashboard for visibility.

Question 3. What are ServiceDefaults in .NET Aspire?

AddServiceDefaults() applies a set of baseline configurations like health checks, OpenTelemetry tracing, and retry policies to your services, ensuring consistency and resiliency by default.

Question 4. How does .NET Aspire simplify service-to-service communication?

Aspire allows logical service referencing using WithReference(), which injects endpoint details dynamically. This eliminates hardcoded URLs and supports environment-agnostic communication.

Question 5. What is the Aspire Dashboard used for?

It provides a visual, real-time interface to monitor all your Aspire services—including logs, traces, metrics, health status, and configuration details.

Conceptual & Best Practices

Question 6. How does .NET Aspire handle configuration management across services?

It uses centralized environment variables and appsettings.json files, automatically propagated across services using DI, keeping configuration clean and consistent.

Question 7. Describe the observability features built into .NET Aspire.

Aspire offers built-in logging, distributed tracing (via OpenTelemetry), service metrics, health monitoring, and visual diagnostics—all integrated through the Aspire Dashboard.

Question 8. What is the purpose of WithReference in Aspire?

It links services together by name, enabling automatic resolution of endpoints, shared configuration, and inter-service communication without manual wiring.

Question 9. How does Aspire support health checks and diagnostics?

By default, Aspire exposes /health endpoints when using AddServiceDefaults(). These are visualized in the dashboard and help validate system readiness and uptime.

Question 10. What are the benefits of Aspire over Docker Compose or Kubernetes for local development?

Aspire eliminates YAMLs and low-level config by offering code-first orchestration. It’s faster for local devs, integrates with .NET tooling, and provides real-time service insight.

Scenario-Based Questions

Question 11. How would you make an existing microservice resilient using Aspire?

Add AddServiceDefaults() to apply default retries and health checks, and configure Polly-based resilience policies using AddResilienceHandler().

Question 12. How do you integrate Polly in a .NET Aspire app?

Use the builder.AddResilienceHandler("name") with.Configure(...) to define policies like retries, timeouts, or circuit breakers. Apply them to outgoing service calls.

Question 13. You're asked to connect SQL Server and Redis in Aspire. What do you do?

Use AddSqlServer() and AddRedis() inside AppHost. Aspire starts containers, discovers endpoints, and injects connection strings automatically via DI.

Question 14. If a microservice crashes, how can Aspire observability help?

Use the dashboard to view service logs, traces, and health status. You can trace calls across services and identify the failure source quickly.

Code-Based Questions

Question 15. What does this code do?

builder.AddProject<Projects.MyApiService>("my-api")
       .WithReference(api => api.WithEnvironment("ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT", "Development"));

It adds the MyApiService project to AppHost, sets the environment variable, and registers it for inter-service discovery.

Question 16. When would you use?AddHttpClientResilienceHandler()?

When calling external APIs or internal services, where network failures are possible. It helps ensure graceful degradation and retry logic.

Deployment & Testing

Question 17. How do you deploy an Aspire app using Azure Developer CLI?

Run “azd init”, set up your project, and deploy with azd up. This provision Azure resources and pushes your Aspire app to the cloud in one step.

Question 18. How does Aspire simplify integration testing?

It enables you to spin up the full app graph (AppHost + services) inside test projects, making real end-to-end tests easy to run and debug locally.

Question 19. What makes Aspire CI/CD ready?

Its structured project model, health checks, tracing, and built-in config support make it easy to plug into CI/CD pipelines without complex container orchestration.

Question 20. How do you run and validate everything from one place in Aspire?

Just run the AppHost project—this starts all services, connects them via DI and references, applies policies, and launches the dashboard for full visibility.

Closing Notes

Mastering .NET Aspire isn't just about knowing the syntax—it's about understanding how its orchestration, observability, and resiliency features empower you to build modern, production-ready cloud-native apps. This chapter was designed to sharpen that understanding and equip you with the language and clarity needed in technical discussions, interviews, or team collaborations.