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Posts by James Newton-King ♔

1999
install shiny new NVIDIA TNT2
windows 98 boots first try (miracle)
launch Quake III Arena demo
hardware acceleration ON
fps go brrrr
install Winamp
it really whips the llama's ass
queue up Prodigy.mp3
alt-tab between frags and vibes
future has arrived

2 months ago 6 0 1 1

My daughter loved it when she was little. I didn’t let my son near it to save my keyboard!

2 months ago 1 0 0 0

Upgrading a 10-year-old website with AI 🤖

🚀 .NET Framework → .NET 10
🌐 ASP.NET MVC → ASP.NET Core
🗄️ Entity Framework 6 → EF Core 10
🎨 Bootstrap 3 → Bootstrap 5
⚡ Sync → Async
💎 KnockoutJS → KnockoutJS (perfection doesn't change)

3 months ago 10 0 0 0

Vibe-migrated my blog as a holiday project: james.newtonking.com/archive/2026... 🎄

I made a console app to scrape HTML and output Markdown. It's 1500 lines of AI slop, one file, full of indecipherable regex. Basically a programming war crime ☠️ But it did its job and now I'll throw it away.

3 months ago 11 1 2 0

Some OTEL #aspnetcore improvements before Christmas 🎄

📊 Set OTEL HTTP semantic convention attributes in #aspnetcore hosting
github.com/dotnet/aspne...

🛣️ Transform static route parameters. For example, {controller}/{action}/{id?} → Products/Get/{id?}
github.com/dotnet/aspne...

3 months ago 10 3 1 0

A CLI‑based MCP server that uses stdio transport instead of HTTP transport solves these problems. It's easier to get started and use.

In the long term, we'll probably add APIs to the dashboard to fetch telemetry data and deprecate the dashboard MCP.

4 months ago 0 0 0 0
Video

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

4 months ago 4 1 1 0
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Screenshot of the structured logs page with the Gen AI button displayed.

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

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 ⛵️

4 months ago 5 0 0 0
Screenshot of the GenAI visualizer with video content.

Screenshot of the GenAI visualizer with video content.

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...

4 months ago 3 0 0 0
Screenshot of the open resource details menu.

Screenshot of the open resource details menu.

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.

4 months ago 4 2 0 0

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 4:

Bug fixes! 🐞

🌐 Status code middleware no longer interfers with API calls
💫 Interaction service can open a dialog when the dashboard is first loaded
🤡 Trace detail page doesn't error when a span duration is 24+ days (2^32 ms)

4 months ago 3 1 0 0
Screenshot of the dashboard showing the last time a health check ran.

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

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 🙃

4 months ago 11 2 1 1
Screenshot of the resources page with the parameters tab selected.

Screenshot of the resources page with the parameters tab selected.

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 🧹

4 months ago 12 1 0 0
Screenshot of the Gen AI visualizer with tool definitons displayed.

Screenshot of the Gen AI visualizer with tool definitons displayed.

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.

4 months ago 5 3 1 0

👀

4 months ago 2 0 0 0
Screenshot of Aspire MCP dialog

Screenshot of Aspire MCP dialog

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

5 months ago 6 2 1 0
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Screenshot of the Azure provisioning dialog.

Screenshot of the Azure provisioning dialog.

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 🚀

5 months ago 9 2 1 1
Resource graph with language specific resource icons.

Resource graph with language specific resource icons.

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.

5 months ago 28 5 1 1

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 3:

Big perf gains when displaying traces with thousands of spans:

📂 Don’t refetch trace if it hasn’t changed
🔍 Use dictionary lookups to turn O(n) → O(1)
🧠 Cache calculations

Large traces (10k+ spans) now update in sub-second time!

5 months ago 20 2 1 0
Color preview web page

Color preview web page

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 🤓

5 months ago 11 0 2 0
Screenshot of tooltip displaying multiple lines.

Screenshot of tooltip displaying multiple lines.

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. 💬✨

5 months ago 18 2 1 1
Video

.NET Aspire ❌
Aspire ✅🤌🏼

we're officially rebranding - starting with our shiny new website, aspire.dev 💫

join us for a special edition #AspiriFriday to wrap up the week and celebrate with the team! see you there 🎃

5 months ago 52 21 2 6

No.

The GenAI visualizer a UI that specializes in displaying detailed AI telemetry from apps. It’s useful if you’re working on apps that use AI

6 months ago 0 0 1 0
Video

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)

6 months ago 16 2 1 0
Trace detail page showing destination resource in details.

Trace detail page showing destination resource in details.

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 🔗

6 months ago 15 3 0 0
Traces page with an error trace.

Traces page with an error trace.

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.

6 months ago 17 3 1 1
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Screenshot of the console logs page with (All) selected.

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

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.

6 months ago 11 0 0 0
Preview
From the dotnet community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the dotnet community

Lots of people using Aspire ❤️

I also learned:
🐧 App host doesn't run on Linux (it does)
🔒 Aspire creates lock in (confidently stated after saying they haven't tried Aspire)
🐴 Not only has Aspire not left preview, it will never leave preview

www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/com...

6 months ago 5 0 1 1
Traces page with a type selected.

Traces page with a type selected.

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.

6 months ago 14 2 0 1

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 5:

The dashboard selects the best duration unit based on its length:

Long → seconds (s)
Short → milliseconds (ms)
Very short → microseconds (μs)

In 9.5 you'll see seconds more often, with microseconds shown only to avoid 0.00ms.

6 months ago 7 0 0 0