Aspire 13.2 Adds an AI-Agent-Native CLI and TypeScript AppHosts

What Happened#

The headline change is conceptual: Aspire now treats AI coding agents as first-class users of its tooling. Running aspire agent init adds skill files that teach an agent how to use Aspire CLI workflows, route tasks to focused skills and call companion tools, and it can configure the Aspire MCP server. That server, which uses the stdio transport, gives an agent runtime access to resource status, logs, traces and commands. In the documentation's words, the goal is for agents to diagnose local failures and verify fixes with runtime evidence rather than guessing from source code alone.

Several new commands support that workflow. Detached mode lets a developer or an agent start an AppHost in the background and manage it later:

aspire agent init   # add skill files and optional MCP configuration
aspire start        # run the AppHost in detached mode
aspire describe     # resource details, as shown in the dashboard
aspire stop         # stop the background AppHost

aspire describe exposes the same resource information as the dashboard, aspire doctor checks certificates, container runtimes, the .NET SDK and WSL2 configuration, and aspire docs brings the aspire.dev documentation into the terminal. On the dashboard side, a new HTTP API under /api/telemetry lists resources and queries spans and logs, and ?follow=true streams results as NDJSON. The API is disabled by default and must be enabled with the ASPIRE_DASHBOARD_API_ENABLED setting.

The TypeScript AppHost preview extends Aspire's polyglot push. Developers can describe resources with createBuilder(), addRedis and addProject in TypeScript while Aspire's .NET host still performs orchestration. The Foundry integration, meanwhile, lets a C# AppHost provision a Foundry project and model deployment and publish an agent service as a hosted agent:

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var foundry = builder.AddFoundry("foundry");
var project = foundry.AddProject("agents");
var chat = project.AddModelDeployment("chat", FoundryModel.OpenAI.Gpt5Mini);

builder.AddPythonApp("agent", "..\\agent", "main:app")
    .PublishAsHostedAgent(project);

builder.Build().Run();

Other additions include a VS Code extension with an Activity Bar panel and health CodeLens, bulk telemetry export and import in the dashboard, new integrations for Azure Data Lake Storage, MongoDB with EF Core, Bun and Certbot, Docker Compose publishing, and an Aspire.Hosting.Azure.Network integration for virtual networks, NAT gateways, network security groups and private endpoints.