dotnet details how automating onboarding with .NET Aspire, Visual Studio settings, and Winget can dramatically speed up the new engineer setup process and streamline developer workflows.

Automating Engineer Onboarding with .NET Aspire and Visual Studio

Organizations often invest significant resources into onboarding new engineers, only to encounter slow manual setups and heavy senior staff involvement. This session explains how to automate and accelerate onboarding, reducing setup time from days to under an hour.

Key Automation Tools

.NET Aspire: Used for orchestrating cloud-native app environments and simplifying service configurations.
Winget Configuration: Automates installation of required tools and dependencies.
Visual Studio Settings Export/Import: Allows teams to share IDE configurations quickly and consistently.

Benefits

Time Savings: Setup time for new hires drops dramatically.
Consistency: All engineers have matching toolchains and IDE setups.
Reduced Dependency: Less need for senior developers to guide basic setup, freeing their time.

Tech Stack & Versions Highlighted

.NET 10: Enhanced and unified for all workloads (Learn more)
.NET Aspire 13: Simplified orchestration for cloud-native apps (Announcement)
ASP.NET Core 10: Modern, secure, full-stack web development (Release notes)
.NET MAUI 10: Cross-platform UI (Details)
C# 14 & F# 10: Language improvements (C#, F#)
Visual Studio 2026: Faster and smarter IDE (Announcement)

How to Implement

Automate Tool Installation: Use Winget configuration files to define the set of tools and software each engineer needs.
Standardize IDE Configurations: Export, distribute, and import Visual Studio settings to ensure a consistent developer environment.
Orchestrate Services: Take advantage of .NET Aspire for local orchestration of cloud-native dependencies and microservices.

Additional Resources

By leveraging these tools and approaches, teams can drastically reduce friction for new engineers and increase project delivery velocity.