Microsoft Releases Aspire 13.5 with Refreshed Dashboard and Workflow Improvements

Dashboard Visual Refresh and Usability

Microsoft's Aspire 13.5 update includes a visual refresh for the Aspire dashboard and the aspire.dev homepage. The layout and features of the dashboard remain consistent, ensuring familiarity for existing users. Microsoft also addressed contrast and accessibility in the updated interface.

The dashboard received several smaller, frequently requested improvements. These include case-insensitive console log search, filtering of logs and traces by timestamp or exact numeric comparison, improved reconnection logic for resource-service connections, and more user-friendly health-check failure messages.

Enhanced Developer Interaction Service

The Interaction Service in Aspire, which allows resource commands to request input or display notifications, now supports file imports. Commands can open a file picker for JSON or YAML files, enforce size limits, and provide a stream to the AppHost for reading. This removes the previous requirement of placing files in a specific directory before running a script.

Additionally, the Interaction Service now allows longer tasks to display a progress dialog with optional cancellation. Commands can also declare named arguments that appear as input controls in the dashboard and as options in the command-line interface, facilitating complete setup or import flows for integration authors.

Integrated Terminal Functionality

Aspire 13.5 introduces an experimental feature that embeds a terminal directly within the dashboard. By adding WithTerminal(), resources can gain an interactive terminal session, which is useful for shells, REPLs, and other tools requiring real-time input and output. Users can type into the terminal, switch between replicas, and return to console logs without interrupting the session. Multiple viewers can also attach to the same process simultaneously.