Microsoft has announced a new tool called Project Tye that is designed to make it easier to develop, test, and deploy microservices.

According to Microsoft, developers often want to run more than one service or project at once when building an app. This can be hard to set up, and even once it is set up, there is a steep learning curve to get a distributed app running on a platform like Kubernetes.

Microsoft’s Project Tye aims to address this challenge and has two main goals. 

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The first goal is making the development of microservices easier by running many services with a single command, using dependencies in containers, and discovering addresses of other services using simple conventions.

The second goal is automating deployment of .NET applications to Kubernetes. This is achieved by automatically containerizing .NET apps, generating Kubernetes manifests with minimal configuration, and using a single configuration file. 

“If you have an app that talks to a database, or an app that is made up of a couple of different processes that communicate with each other, then we think Tye will help ease some of the common pain points you’ve experienced,” Amiee Lo, program manager of ASP.NET, wrote in a post.

The project is currently considered to be an experimental project and will keep that experimental status until .NET 5 ships. Then, Microsoft will evaluate the tool and determine its future. 

Installation instructions are available here and a demo of the tool from Microsoft Build can be viewed here.