At NDC, most sessions showcase best practices, clean architectures, and polished demos. Nico Vermeir’s talk was different—it was a real-world war story. As an Application Architect at Inetum Belgium and a Microsoft MVP, Nico pulled back the curtain on a year-long government project that combined .NET Aspire and Dapr—and the many roadblocks, technical twists, and client quirks along the way.
From unclear hosting decisions and Terraform headaches to legacy Identity Server 3 authentication and buggy shared Blazor components, the project was anything but smooth sailing. Yet, Aspire’s streamlined development loop and Dapr’s abstraction layer became the team’s lifeline—accelerating onboarding, simplifying service discovery, and keeping distributed services running smoothly in both local and cloud environments.
Nico candidly shared upgrade pains from early Aspire previews, the dance of managing multiple stakeholders, and clever workarounds like init containers for database migrations and sticky session hacks for Blazor Server in Azure Container Apps. His verdict? Aspire was a clear win for multi-service development productivity that can be a productivity booster on Dapr projects.
Packed with technical depth, lessons learned, and a few good-natured rants about customer decisions, this session was a rare glimpse into the messy, practical realities of modern distributed system delivery. If you want to go beyond “Hello World” and see what happens when cutting-edge tech meets real-world complexity, Nico’s talk is a must-watch.
