iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/12/2025

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 8: The Aspire dashboard MCP is wrapped by the CLI MCP: aspire.dev/get-started/... ✨ This fixes dashboard MCP limitations: - NodeJS hates self-signed certs - Endpoint and API key aren't constant - Unavailable unless the dashboard is running

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/12/2025

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 7: Small QoL improvement: when logs are associated with a Gen AI span, a button to open the visualizer is shown ✨ No need to jump to the traces page, making the Gen AI visualizer easier to discover ⛵️

Screenshot of the structured logs page with the Gen AI button displayed.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/12/2025

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 6: The Gen AI visualizer now supports audio and video previews. Listen to or view media being analyzed by AI, as well as AI-generated content 📽️ This feature is powered by HTML's <audio> and <video> elements: developer.mozilla.org/docs/Learn_w...

Screenshot of the GenAI visualizer with video content.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 16/12/2025

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 5: Resource details buttons have moved into a menu. This makes them consistent with other detail controls and lets us include a text description for each action.

Screenshot of the open resource details menu.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 13/12/2025

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 3: Resource health checks now show when they last ran ❤️‍🩹 This change removes uncertainty when viewing the dashboard: Yes, your resource is still broken, and no, Aspire hasn't stopped checking it 🙃

Screenshot of the dashboard showing the last time a health check ran.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 12/12/2025

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 2: We've added a dedicated Parameters tab to the Resources page to keep things tidy for apps with lots of parameters 🧹

Screenshot of the resources page with the parameters tab selected.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 11/12/2025

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 1: Aspire's Gen AI Visualizer adds a UI for tool definitions. You can now view detailed information about tools included in an AI request.

Screenshot of the Gen AI visualizer with tool definitons displayed.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 12/11/2025

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 6: Introducing the Aspire MCP server. Integrate Aspire into your dev AI eco-system. 🚀 Observe resources (health status, endpoints, etc) 🪄 Debug with real-time console logs 📊 Investigate dev-time telemetry ⚙️ Execute resource commands

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 11/11/2025

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 5: The interaction service just got a major upgrade ⚡ 💫 Dropdowns can now accept text — in other words, ComboBox inputs. 🔄 Supports dynamic data loading for cascading dropdowns. See it in action in the Azure provisioning dialog 🚀

Screenshot of the Azure provisioning dialog.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 10/11/2025

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 4: Aspire is going polyglot with strong support for JavaScript ☕ and Python 🐍 apps. The dashboard features new programming language resource icons.

Resource graph with language specific resource icons.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 08/11/2025

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 2: New dashboard accent colors. 🎨 They're now more FluentUI-ish (saturation++) with custom tweaks for light and dark themes. Dark blue is no longer almost invisible on a dark background 🤓

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 07/11/2025

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 1: The log entry tooltip now adjusts its size dynamically! It stays compact for short messages and expands to show multiple lines when the message is longer. 💬✨

Screenshot of tooltip displaying multiple lines.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 27/09/2025

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 10: Introducing the Gen AI Visualizer ✨ Collate and summarize AI telemetry: 🗃️ Explore input and output messages 🚀 JSON/XML payloads highlighted and indented 🖼️ Preview Markdown and multimodal content (e.g. images)

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 25/09/2025

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 9: Span details now show the destination of a span 📍 For database calls, HTTP requests, or RPC calls, Aspire matches the target address to a resource and displays it as a clickable link 🔗

Trace detail page showing destination resource in details.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 24/09/2025

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 8: Traces with errors are now highlighted 🚨 This brings the traces page in line with how error logs are displayed.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 23/09/2025

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 7: The console logs page now has an (All) option. As you’d expect, it lets you view logs from all resources at once.

Screenshot of the console logs page with (All) selected.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 22/09/2025

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 6: Traces pages now have a type filter 🔎 - a quick way to find traces and spans for the selected operation type. For example, choose Messaging 📬 to see only traces from your app that interact with RabbitMQ.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 20/09/2025

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 4: The trace detail page adds new "Expand all" and "Collapse all" buttons.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 19/09/2025

Fun AI use: Updating the accent colors in the Aspire dashboard to be more Fluent design-ish. AI tasks: 🎨 Tweak the existing color scheme to follow Fluent 🌃 Output light are dark optimized colors 🌐 Generate HTML page to preview

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 19/09/2025

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 3: Details controls for resources, logs, and spans got a facelift. Now with icons 🎨 and links 🔗 where they're useful.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 18/09/2025

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 2: Consistent text alignment comes to resource, log and span details 🤓 Screenshow below is what it looks like today... 🚨 OCD trigger warning 🚨

Screenshot of old text alignment in details view

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/09/2025

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 1: The trace detail page gets some quality-of-life improvements: 🏷️ Span names are clearer, with resources split into their own column 🪵 Logs are now shown in the waterfall chart. Hover for a tooltip, or click for full details

Screenshot of trace detail page showing new resource column and log entries UI.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 19/08/2025

The Aspire team is cooking up a new (All) option for the console logs page. Want everything at once? (All) gives you all resource logs in one view 🚀 #dotnet #aspire

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 29/07/2025

Aspire 9.4 is out. 🛠️ Aspire CLI is generally available 🖥️ Interaction service 📢 Parameter prompting 🔔 Automatic upgrade check notifications 🌐 External service modeling ✨ YARP routing API 🐳 Improved persistent containers And much much more: learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspir...

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 27/07/2025

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 7: A common bug with command-line arguments is passing a single argument with spaces when multiple are expected 💥 The dashboard now adds quotation marks around arguments containing spaces for clarity 📝

Screenshot of resources page showing an argument with spaces.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 27/07/2025

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 6: Resources with a connection string (databases 🗄️, caches 🧠, message brokers 📬, etc.) now display the connection string in the dashboard.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 25/07/2025

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 5: The console logs page now lets you toggle log line wrapping on or off 🪵

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 25/07/2025

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 4: The trace detail page gets some quality-of-life improvements: 📊 The name column is wider to show more detail ℹ️ Header trace details now collapse to prevent wrapping

Screenshot of trace detail showing improvements.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 23/07/2025

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 2: The dashboard now shows an update notification when a newer version of Aspire is available 📢

Dashboard screenshot displaying an update notification.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 22/07/2025

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 1: The reconnect dialog got an upgrade: 🎨 Improved look in light and dark themes 🔄 More reliable, thanks to Blazor improvements More details here: learn.microsoft.com/aspnet/core/...

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 16/07/2025

GitHub Copilot understood the screenshot in my comment, interpreted the emoji and made a good fix. Color me impressed.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 20/06/2025

Hold on to your butts, Aspire vNext has some 🔥 new features.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 11/06/2025

Dashboard reconnect dialog improvements coming in Aspire vNext: ⚡️ New reconnect dialog introduced in Blazor .NET 9 🎨 Light & dark mode support 🌍 Fully localized dialog #dotnet #aspire

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 20/05/2025

Aspire 9.3 new dashboard features, day 7: It's release day and there's a surprise dashboard feature. GitHub Copilot is your new AI debugging assistant 🚀 📒 Review hundreds of log messages in one click 🚨 Find root causes of errors faster 🧠 Explain error codes using AI's vast knowledge base

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 19/05/2025

Aspire 9.3 new dashboard features, day 6: The console logs page URL now uses a friendly resource name (e.g., frontend) instead of an internal ID. This means you can bookmark the page and it’ll work across dashboard launches 🔖 #dotnet #aspire

Screenshot of the console logs page with the cleaned up URL highlighted.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 18/05/2025

Aspire 9.3 new dashboard features, day 5: Minor tweak: the top-right dashboard menu now features larger icons for easier clicking 🐭 #dotnet #aspire

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/05/2025

Aspire 9.3 new dashboard features, day 4: Calls to resources that don’t record their own telemetry — like databases or caches — are now visible in the Traces page UI 🔥 You can also filter for them directly using the resource selector 🧙‍♂️ #dotnet #aspire

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 15/05/2025

Aspire 9.3 new dashboard features, day 3: Pausing telemetry on the metrics page now shows a warning ⚠️ If metrics aren't updating, we want it to be clear it's because you paused them — not because your app or the dashboard is broken! 😇 #dotnet #aspire

Screenshot of the metrics page with the pause warning displayed.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 14/05/2025

Aspire 9.3 new dashboard features, day 2: The resource page now remembers your filters. You can filter resources by type, state, or health — and your selections will persist when you return to the page 🧐 #dotnet #aspire

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 14/05/2025

Aspire 9.3 new dashboard features, day 1: The resource graph adds a context menu. Right click on a resource to view telemetry, run commands or navigate to endpoints. #dotnet #aspire

Screenshot of the resource graph with a context menu open.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 22/04/2025

New feature coming in Aspire vNext: Calls to outgoing resources, such as a database or cache, are visible on the traces page UI 🔥 And you can filter to them directly using the resources selector 🧙‍♂️ github.com/dotnet/aspir... #dotnet #aspire

Screenshot of Aspire dashboard. The traces page shows outgoing resources.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 15/04/2025

The resources graph adds a context menu in Aspire vNext:

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 11/04/2025

.NET Aspire 9.2 is out. 🧩 Dashboard resource graph 🎨 Resource icons ⏯️ Pause and resume telemetry 🌐 HTTP-based resource commands 🤝 Integrations updates 🚀 Deployment improvements 🆕 Aspire CLI (Preview) learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspir...

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 10/04/2025

Aspire 9.2 new dashboard features, day 14: Aspire 9.2 release day is here! 🎉 We saved the best for last: the resource graph. Visualize your app's resources and relationships with with this interactive tool. Select, zoom, pan, drag, filter, explore, and build cool apps 💪 #dotnet #aspire

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 09/04/2025

Aspire 9.2 new dashboard features, day 13: Pausing telemetry is coming in 9.2! Now you can pause and resume the collection of console logs, structured logs, traces, and metrics directly from the dashboard ⏯️ #dotnet #aspire

Screenshot of the dashboard showing the pause button.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 09/04/2025

Aspire 9.2 new dashboard features, day 12: Resource command buttons are now disabled while running. No more errors from accidentally double-clicking a command 🖱️ #dotnet #aspire

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 08/04/2025

Aspire 9.2 new dashboard features, day 11: 'WithHttpCommand' is now a first-class citizen, allowing you to invoke HTTP endpoints from the dashboard 🌏 The example below demonstrates a command that calls the '/reset-db' endpoint on a resource. #dotnet #aspire

C# code to add a command using WithHttpCommand.

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 06/04/2025

Aspire 9.2 new dashboard features, day 9: Consistency in icons, brought to you by @maddymontaquila.net. The console logs and resources pages now use the 'Options' icon instead of a gear ⚙️❌ #dotnet #aspire

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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 05/04/2025

Aspire 9.2 new dashboard features, day 8: The dashboard now warns you when a metric exceeds the configured cardinality limit. Once exceeded, the metric no longer provides accurate information 🤥 Learn more about cardinality limits: opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/o...

Screenshot of a metric with the cardinality limit warning.

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