[New article]: Aspire Resource Model: Concepts, Design, and Authoring Guidance

[davidfowl]

Proposed topic or title

Aspire Resource Model: Concepts, Design, and Authoring Guidance

Location in table of contents.

fundamentals/resource-model

Reason for the article

Developers, integrators, and contributors building on Aspire need a deep understanding of the resource model that underpins distributed application development.
Without a clear mental model, it's easy to misuse Aspire's APIs, flatten structured values too early, or create brittle application graphs.
This article would fill a major gap by explaining Aspire’s fundamental concepts — resources, annotations, structured values, references, endpoint allocation — in one cohesive guide.
It would prevent architectural mistakes and enable a wider audience to author custom resources, publishers, and tooling with confidence.

Article abstract

This article explains the Aspire Resource Model in depth, covering how distributed applications are expressed as graphs of inert resources, how metadata is layered through annotations, how structured references and values enable safe deferred evaluation, and how lifecycle orchestration works.
Readers will learn how to properly model services, extend Aspire with custom resource types, manage dependencies, and author value providers and publishers that integrate cleanly with the Aspire ecosystem.

Relevant searches

No response

[davidfowl]

@IEvangelist I wrote this gist https://gist.github.com/davidfowl/b408af870d4b5b54a28bf18bffa127e1

I don't know if it should be a single doc, but it has all of the right content I think (I did lots of brain dumping and rewriting). It also contains #2340 so we can scrap that one.

[davidfowl]

cc @mitchdenny @eerhardt @captainsafia @aaronpowell @Alirexaa would love to get your feedback (and any other community toolkit members that have been building integrations).

[IEvangelist]

Please see #3156 which might address at least some of this work.