2018 Submissions

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Many developers have not taken the time to stay immersed in what CSS can do, and most take advantage only of the most minimal levels of what it can do when applying styles to a project. However, CSS is capable of far more things now than many developers realize. This presentation reveals some of the things CSS can do that many people use JS frameworks and plugins for, and discusses performance and usage pros and cons, including accessibility. We can make a pure-CSS party parrot, but that doesn't mean we really should... or should we?

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

React has caught a lot of criticism for the full mixing of HTML and JS, but it is a large portion of the rising tide of the JS landscape today - and many more websites are componentizing all the parts of the front end. Why are we leaving our CSS behind in giant stylesheets? CSS deserves the improved scope and modular building that we incorporate into today's HTML and JS. The goal of this talk is to approach the pros and cons of several different styles of handling CSS in a modular way, and reveal myths about performance that hold many back, while acknowledging the limitations of all the approaches. While focused on React examples, the core takeaways about modular CSS are not dependent on React, and apply to most component-based UI.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

With so many developers launching into deep JavaScript Front End Frameworks like React or Angular from a background of IDE development, many developers are not fully leveraging browser tooling to debug and understand everything in their code. This presentation will include a deep look at all the built in tools in Chrome, as well as some of the more important and popular browser extensions for front end development.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

UX/UI Design and UX/UI Development are becoming a whole field of development unto themselves, but many companies are focusing on the beautiful aspect -- sometimes just the beauty and utility as it applies to certain individuals in management, instead of all clients. Disabilities that cause product users to need screen readers, screen magnifiers, speech to text and text to speech, keyboard only users, braille users -- are frequently left with an inferior product to use, when there are many simple ways to insure that your modern designs are not pushing disabled users farther away from your content.

Internet of Things 0

As a cloud architect one must be familiar with the pets vs cattle metaphor (Randy Bias & Bill Baker, https://virtuallytd.com/articles/pets-vs-cattle-analogy-explained/ ) – in the cloud, a virtual machine is just another expandable resource! However, an IoT system may have to manage a huge number of devices, each one of them has a unique identity and a unique role. This is where the Pets vs Cattle metaphor fails – we need to handle pets in a cloud scale. Beside the need to manage many end-devices, the IoT system must handle vast amount of data streams, extract near-real-time information as well as conduct batch processing that enables modern business scenarios, utilizing big data and machine learning capabilities. This lecture explains the complexity of the IoT problem domain and shows Azure SaaS and PaaS solution approaches: The Azure IoT Central and Azure IoT Suite. We will explore the new Azure Device Provisioning Service (DPS) and see how it provides a scale approach to secure provisioning new IoT devices. We will explore the Azure IoT Hub and see its functional features and non-functional quality attributes such as security, scale, high-availability and health monitoring. We will conclude the lecture with the future of IoT: "Smart Cloud and Intelligent edge" by presenting the Azure IoT Edge. You will learn: 1. The complexity of a modern IoT system 2. The Azure IoT SaaS and PaaS approach 3. Secure provisioning IoT devices at scale 4. The smart Azure IoT Edge

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

In the past – debugging was a task for the Spartan developer. We had to debug with Console.WriteLine like cavemen. The present is nice and easy. The future will be magical! We'll be able to debug in a way no man has experienced before. Ever wonder how you can easily debug LINQ queries? or find which part of the code has changed the object state? Have you ever wanted to see what will happen in the future without single stepping into the next line of code? This session explains how to solve software bugs in a systematic method. We will explore the current Visual Studio debugger, showing some advanced features that can be used to enhance productivity and solve bugs faster. The session also includes information about the best Visual Studio debugging add-on – OzCode and reveals our plans for future debugging features! After this session your debugging experience will never be the same! You will learn: • A systematic method to find and solve bugs • Advanced Visual Studio debugging capabilities to control the debugging session • Advanced OzCode debugging tools that will save you time • LINQ debugging • Predicting the future

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

There are cases where bugs are discovered only after the product is shipped and used by the end users. The main reason for these bugs that appear only in the production environment is the use of real user scenarios with real user data. Production debugging is about solving customer-facing issues that aren't easily reproducible in the development or testing environments. When it comes to cloud hosted application, production debugging becomes even harder. The code is running on multiple hosts, a business flow can span many services. A remote debugging session with the cloud is dangerous and may introduce side effects to the current running software, such as performance degradation, interruption of service, and data correctness issues. Microsoft provides a new feature that let you take a dump file of a service hosted in Azure. In an analogy, a dump file is like a single picture from a movie – a memory image of a single service in a single execution context. Viewing a dump file might reveal some facts about the execution state of the specific service, but it does not show the business flow and does not provide a way to single-step through the code. In this lecture, the audience will see a revolutionary tool and approach for a cloud production debugging. The participant will learn how to get series of related dump files, how to get the right version of the source code for the deployed solution, how to dig into the code and have a what-if scenarios where the developer can change the code and data and see the result without effecting the production environment. You will learn: 1. The difficulties of debugging modern cloud hosted application 2. Methods and tools for capturing state and debugging cloud hosted services 3. Azure, Visual Studio and OzCode Enterprise Cloud Debugger

Internet of Things 0

Monitoring water temperature, opening a yard gate and detecting water flood are just few samples of the many scenarios that simple IoT system can answer. Azure IoT Hub can be used to connect many different types of devices. At the lowest end, you can use it to connect a less than 3$ WiFi capable system on a chip microcontroller, such as the WeMos D1 Pro and NodeMCU. In this lecture we will dive into the details of the Azure IoT hub. We will understand the service and its SDKs. We will see how we can build a WiFI capable, Arduino based, cloud controlled IoT smart switch. We will then use a cross platform Xamarin based application to activate the smart switch. You will learn: • An Internet of Thing system overview • How to create and use the Azure IoT Hub • Implementing an Azure IoT client SDK based solution • Provisioning IoT devices, sending information to the cloud and receiving commands • Arduino development using Visual Studio with Visual Micro

Internet of Things 0

Solar collectors and electrical heaters are the common ways to hit the water storage tank. In many cases the operation of such systems is based on setting a time switch to turn on and off the heater for specific periods during the day. This primitive solution might provide hot water when it is needed, however it is far from being optimize. The heater works even if the water in the tank is hot enough, for example in a summer sunny day. Having a smart monitoring system enables energy optimization and provides insight of the effectiveness of the solar system. In this lecture the audience will learn how to build a smart device that monitor the water temperature and report it to the cloud. The device reads the water temperature in the top and the bottom of the water tank. The device also monitors the electrical power consumption of the water heater. With the power of the cloud, the water heater device is controlled. The lecture presents the ESP32 microcontroller and its SDK, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Service Bus Queue, Azure Functions, Power BI, as well as Android Wear Xamarin based application.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Many developers and architects are familiar with the Microservice Architecture main concepts. Breaking the system to many small autonomous and high cohesive services, reducing the coupling in the system, having better isolation utilizing modern hosts such as Docker containers and so forth. However, having many small moving parts may lead to higher integration and management complexity. In traditional Service-Oriented Architecture, there is usually a controller, or a manager that orchestrates the business flow. Having such a service simplifies the system, but might contradict some of the Micro Service Architecture principals. In the other hand having decoupled services that communicate by publishing messages in a reactive manner, provides the promised Micro Service Architecture flexibility, but introduces the cost of higher complexity. The lecture starts with a short introduction to the Micro Service Architecture. Then, the audience will learn about the orchestration and the chorography service communication approaches, the pros and cons of each of the method and even a method that enables combining the two. With this knowledge the participants will be able to choose the best method that fits their need.

Internet of Things 0

On today’s world stage, our first impressions in business are increasingly virtual, as new media give us unprecedented access across national borders. Explore the cultural side of digital communication and the skills you need to adapt content and engagement strategies to this forum. Digital communication levels the international playing field, but it is far from being a geography-neutral cultural leveler. As a message travels through a digital tunnel across cultures, the traditional accompanying body language and social cues are stripped away, and can render it ineffective, misunderstood, or even offensive. Learn different regional communication styles and perceptions of time, discover why emojis aren’t universal, and explore cultural preferences for layout, animation, sound, and even color in digital media. Get ready for a dynamic, interactive presentation that includes a quick primer in Globish, set to replace English as the international lingua franca of the internet. Multidisciplinary content draws on emerging research in intercultural new media studies, developments in neural machine translation (NMT), differing national legal regulations and restrictions on new media, academic theories on intercultural dynamics, and relevant studies in psychology and sociology. You’ll takeaway expertise in customizing digital content to engage subscribers from diverse cultures beyond simply translating and localizing text.

General 0

Microsoft makes it easy to create chat bots with the Bot Framework. They provide the basic building blocks and I’ll show you how to put it all together. In this talk I’ll demonstrate how to use LUIS (Natural Language Processing), QnA Maker, and Bot Builder Framework v4 to create an awesome chatbot with C#. Bot Builder v4 just went from "preview" to "general availabilty".

General 0

With all the advances of technology, sometimes our abilities to access data far exceeds guidelines that have been set for what we should or should not do as we develop applications. Where do the boundaries of what we can do cross the line of what we should do? What responsibility do we have towards the users of the applications that we create? Quite often the average user of web and mobile applications do not understand privacy policies, have no idea why the application needs certain information (sometimes it doesn't!), and are afraid to not give permissions because the app might not work. They also often have no idea how dangerous it can be to have all their information out there. Some professions have a governing agency to enforce compliance to an ethical standard, but there is no governing agency over software developers. Does this mean we have no responsibility to be ethical in the software that we create or do we need to hold ourselves to some standard? And what would that standard be? I have had an interest in ethics/business ethics since my first year in University when I took a business ethics course. With all the headlines about applications invading privacy of the user, I have often wondered what individual developers thought about the privacy of their users as they were developing the application. It occurs to me that it is possible they had not even given it a thought. This is an exploration into how different ethical mores apply to the work that we do as software developers and what responsibilities we have as developers to the users of the software that we create.

General 0

As software developers, our goal is to typically write software that meets the needs of our clients, whether they be internal or external clients. Often times, when we miss the mark, it is due to a communication breakdown between the developer team and the client team on what the actual requirements are. Communication breakdowns generally occur between people with different communication styles. So how do we bridge that gap and get the information we need from people who communicate differently than we do? This talk will be an exploration of communication styles and how we can recognize our own communication style as well as easily determine the communication style of others. With this information we can communicate with someone in the style in which they best receive information. When we communicate with others in their learning style, we break down barriers and are more able to accurately get to the pain points that they need a solution for. Once the communication barriers are down, it becomes easier to get the requirements that we are looking for.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

View Components were a new feature released as part of .NET Core MVC. They are a great way to create reuseable bits of code that are accessible in your MVC applications. I will walk you through code to create a View Component in an external library and consume it using the Tag Helper syntax in an MVC application

General 0

A general introductory talk on containers and their building blocks. We will discuss the docker platform, the included suite of tools, general command line operation to manage containers, how to build & store images and improve security. Introductory topics around orchestration using Swarm and Kubernetes will also be included.

General 0

A general introductory talk on containers and their building blocks. We will discuss the docker platform, the included suite of tools, general command line operation to manage containers, how to build & store images and improve security. Introductory topics around orchestration using Swarm and Kubernetes will also be included.

General 0

Losing your job is never fun. Whether it is getting fired, being laid off, or the company going out of business, it isn't fun. We can build up an emergency fund so that we're financially okay, but we're still going to have to find a new job before that fund runs out. But good can come from hardship. Come get inspired by my hardship and see how losing your job might end up being the best thing to ever happen to your career!

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Writing JavaScript used to mean a tangled mess of hacks to avoid global variables, jQuery, and oh so many callbacks. ES2015 and beyond have changed all that. We'll migrate a jQuery based website to a more modern foundation, and we'll do it without using any of those JavaScript Frameworks that keep popping up! You'll learn how modern browser JavaScript engines provide a great place to write more readable and maintainable code, and you'll see that you often don't need polyfills or transpilers to use these features!

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Promises. For so long, the sales pitch was "Promises save us from callbacks!" But how? And why? Other than keeping us from having to scroll horizontally, how are Promises solving things? This session will start with explaining exactly what a Promise is, and how it deals with the shortcomings of callbacks. We'll look at how Promises allow us to do things that aren't really possible with callback code and thus how they really are a game changer. Next, we'll look at how we can use our newfound understanding of Promises to better exploit the power of the new async and await keywords that make asynchronous code look and feel more like synchronous code. We'll see how a deep understanding of what Promises are, and how to work with them are still extremely important when writing code using async and await.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Aurelia is a JavaScript client framework for web, mobile and desktop that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity. It's written with next-generation EcmaScript and the framework has no external dependencies. This session is an introduction to this simple to learn, and yet extremely powerful framework that will leave a smile on your face for years.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Server less is the current buzzword in IT applications. There has been increased adoption to server less technologies provided by major cloud providers. Azure Functions is an offering from Microsoft in Azure in the area of Function as a service (Faas). Azure Functions provide two billing modes mainly consumption model or app service model. This talk will go through the scenarios where we will explore the wrong ways of building applications using Azure Functions and how one can avoid these pitfalls and prevent them from heavy billing based on usage. The talk will also go over the different ways of testing Azure Functions and how one can use application insights to avoid the pitfalls. A working session will be conducted with samples and attendees will get all information on developing applications using Azure Functions in an effective way.

Mobile 0

What ever might be your expertise developing web applications, you can use the same skillsets like HTML, CSS and XML along with your favorite scripting language like Javascript, Angular, Typescript or Vue to develop native mobile applications using Native Script. Nativescript is a free and open source solution to develop android and IOS based mobile applications. This session will go through the fundamentals of developing Native Mobile Apps using Native Script leveraging the power of Angular, Typescript or JavaScript as your scripting language. A working session will be conducted covering the basics of Native Script and the steps which are required to develop mobile apps. Participants will be able to develop mobile apps with ease after the talk.

General 0

Attendees will learn how to: 1. Analyze your competition 2. Quickly find product market fit before you build 3. Leverage keyword research to understand how to market their product 4. Build highest converting landing page in order to take the product to market 5. Track engagement Themes: Fun Fast paced learning Engaging

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages such as C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, Go and runtimes such as .NET and Unity. SQL Operations Studio provides database query development with multiple tab windows, a rich T-SQL editor, IntelliSense, keyword completion, code snippets, code navigation, and source control integration. Come see why these cross platform Microsoft tools are gaining in popularity and learn some useful tips and techniques.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

The three most popular JavaScript UI frameworks are React from Facebook, Angular from Google, and Vue from and ex-Google guy. We develop the same single page application in all three frameworks while carefully calling out similarities and differences. The same app is used to compare and contrast bootstrapping, component definition, markup syntax, file structures, component communication, routing, data services, Flux architecture, providers, Visual Studio Code tooling, Typescript, CLIs, browser add-ons, and Material Design integration.

General 0

New features are constantly being added to Microsofts flagship language, C#, and the pace of this change is increasing. In the past couple of years, we welcomed C# 6 and C# 7, the last languages release of their size. Microsoft is now releasing updates to the language in point releases, since C# is no longer tightly coupled to Visual Studio. In 2017 and 2018, Microsoft shipped C# versions 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 without any sign of slowing. Normally, sessions about new language features only happen well before the release of the new language, leaving you with time to forget everything you've learned by the time you're actually able to adopt the new language! In this fast-paced session, Brendan will show you the recent, practical improvements added to C# that you can take back with you and immediately start using to clean up and improve your own code. This is definitely a session you won't want to miss!

General 0

Have you seen people talking about programming live streams? Are you interested to learn more about them? Then this session from Brendan is for you! In 2015, Brendan started up a programming live stream called DevChatter (https://www.twitch.tv/DevChatter/), but he put it on hold until February of 2018 when he started it up again and has been streaming regularly since. In this session, Brendan talks about what he has learned so far and wishes he knew when he started about live streaming. Whether you want to live stream or are just interested in it, you will learn about getting started on Twitch using OBS, the hardware and setup needed, and how to keep an audience entertained on a live stream! This is one session that you won't want to miss!

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

For 15 years, the biggest decision was whether it was time to upgrade to the latest .NET framework or not. Now there is the .NET Framework, .NET Core, and .NET Standard. So many options and it not completely obvious which one (or ones) you should be using. During this session, you see a down to earth description of what each of these are and get an idea of when you should be one or more of these and what version of them based upon what you are building or maintaining.

General 0

Our customers and stakeholders often find what we do to be this black box that just magically spits out software to (hopefully) meet their needs. While this mysticism can be very beneficial, there are a lot of times where it causes negative feelings from them about what we do. During this session you will learn ways to properly manage your customers and stakeholders and keep them in the loop, while not loosing them in the details.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

So many times our customers need a simple routine that can be executed on a routine basis but the solution doesn’t need to be an elaborate solution without going the trouble of setting servers and other infrastructure. Serverless computer is the abstraction of servers, infrastructure, and operating systems and make getting solutions to your customer’s needs much quicker and cheaper. During this session we will look at how Azure Functions will enable you to run code on-demand without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure.

General 0

What is leadership? That term gets thrown around a lot, but what is it really? What do leader do that makes them leaders? Leadership can be learned and that is good as leaders are in high demand and in short supply. TO be an effective leader, you must first understand what leadership is and what traits a leader exhibits. During this session, we will review leadership traits and principles and how you can implement them within your teams. By demonstrating these in your daily activities you will earn the respect, confidence, and loyal cooperation of those on your team.

General 0

One of the most challenging aspect of being a leader is dealing with conflict amongst your team. It’s vital to productivity to get the team running like a well-oiled machine, even in the face of adversity. Improving your relationships with your coworkers, clients, and managers and find your way through conflict back to cooperation. This session will provide you with the secrets of effective conflict resolution and how to prevent conflicts from ever starting.

General 0

Have you heard the developers on your team throw around terms like code smell, DRY, or SOLID you just look at them with a blank stare? When your senior developer tells you that they need to spend a sprint taking care of technical debt do you just think they are wanting some time to goof off? Then this session is for you. We will discuss what exactly software craftsmanship is and what is not and why it can be important on your team.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Azure SQL Database is a cloud-based relationship database service based on Microsoft’s SQL Server engine. It delivers predictable performance, dynamic scalability, and robust data protection so you can focus on front-end application development rather than managing machines and infrastructure. SQL Database supports existing SQL Server tools, libraries, and APIs, making it simple to migrate existing database solutions to the cloud and leverage them using skills you already have. And it features the largest compliance portfolio in the industry, including HIPAA, FERPA, and even Singapore MTCS Level 3. During this session, you will learn the features and benefits of Azure SQL Database. There will also be demonstrations of how to create an Azure SQL Database and populate data into it. We will create an Azure API App to expose the database securely to clients using REST calls, create a Universal Windows Platform app to access the database through the API App, and use security features of SQL database to limit the information returned.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

When we think of CSS and Accessibility, what comes to mind? Is it adding alt attributes to image tags? How about color contrast? Is :focus given that much thought since browser's style these by default? Often, focus outlines are turned off in CSS to meet non-inclusive design standards, but this causes problems for keyboard users. How can we make the web a more inclusive place while maintaining design intent?. As we build more and more things on the web, we must do our part in building awesome, accessible user experiences. Except native default browser styling of the :focus pseudo class is rather blah, don't you think? There has to be a better way to add some pizzazz to elements when users navigate without a mouse. In this talk, I will demo numerous ways to provide custom focus styles despite known limitations in the web platform. For users with disabilities, it's imperative that visual design finds a way to meet in the middle.

General 0

You know that song by Huey Lewis and the News, The Power of Love? "First time you feel it, it might make you sad." Might be how you feel about CSS right? What about the power of CSS? CSS has received a bad name as of late, but truth of the matter is that CSS is such a powerful piece of the front-end puzzle and you should really be excited for what's already here and what's to come! Who would have thought we could create magazine-style layouts with CSS grid? What about ruleset variable scoping with custom properties(CSS variables)? And last but not least, the pain of centering content horizontally and vertically which is now possible in three lines with flexbox! Let's talk about how awesome CSS is, and how we can restore our faith in one of the best things that makes the web amazing!

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

Hacking you say? Yes, I do, but this type of hacking has nothing to do with hooking in Matrix style or surfing through The Gibson at Ellingson Mineral Company. Nope, this type of hacking involves how we as developers, create the illusion of fast load times for our Web applications. Performance is gaining much visibility in the industry and catering to the needs of the user, there are many things we can do to facilitate that need. This talk will focus on ways we can make things appear to be faster than they are and ways to avoid having to play Houdini entirely.

General 0

Video streaming has taken off. The dominant streams are showing people playing video games live, but have you considered YOUR user group? Have you considered building YOUR personal brand by pair programming with your viewers? Live streaming is perfect to extend the reach of user groups and meetups beyond those who attend in person. The Philly.NET and Philly Azure developer groups are now streaming every event live. You can live stream your work from your desktop at home to build a community, get feedback on your work, and share your projects with the world. In this session, Chris Gomez tells you the reasons why you want to start live streaming in 2018. We'll go over free and low-cost software, hardware and services. This talk aims to keep it affordable so you can take your content to the world, and not let it evaporate when your user group ends for the night. We'll get technical and look in depth into what happens when Chris presses play, and how to set up equipment to bring the whole production together. Anyone can do this, and it will do wonders for your personal brand as a developer and your user group's reach to the world. Want to sit down at a live setup ready to stream? Here's your chance.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

.NET Core promises to remove the shackles from Windows and Visual Studio. What does the development process look like and can you really use a Linux desktop as your daily development driver? Can you really go to production on Linux with your applications? This talk explores .NET Core and ASP.NET Core from a different angle. What if we start in Linux and stay in Linux? It will explore the daily development life when you are going to be completely outside Visual Studio. This means getting to know the dotnet command line interface a little better. Then we'll explore how you can deploy your applications on Linux, including containers and deployment to the cloud. This session is perfect for .NET veterans who are brand new to .NET Core and want to see what the brave new world looks and feels like. It’s okay if you’re unfamiliar with Linux, but are interested in having options available to you. And if you're curious what it's like to work in other tools such as Visual Studio Code and Rider, this session is for you.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

As developers, we know the power of telemetry. Telemetry events and logs provide diagnostic insights of our applications and infrastructure in a detailed, expressive and concise manner. In this talk we’ll navigate which metrics and tooling help us as web application developers, and how these various insights can be leverage across the office. By sharing application-oriented metrics, we can help the business side understand development and application struggles and gain their own insights to power business decisions-- all from those numbers that we already love to see.

DevOps / SDLC 0

Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Mesos are amazing container orchestration platforms. These tools provide a proven platform for container management and resource density. They are also complex distributed applications. We all know that just adding more bits to our stack doesn’t necessarily solve our problems. We’ll cover how to get started with containers in production via manual management and simplified container orchestrations tools, like Azure Container Instances.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Struggling to get your website to load in less than 5 seconds on a mobile phone? You’re not alone! At Comcast we’ve built many responsive sites and work hard at optimizing for performance. Using the latest PRPL pattern and Progressive Web API’s, we provide a compelling alternative to native apps. This talk will cover why performance of your site is so important and dive into the Chrome performance tools to explain exactly how a browser loads a site and what causes things to slow down. We’ll cover what a PWA is and why service workers are a bear.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

What happens when the code for your Entity Framework LINQ queries looks good, but your app is very slow? Are you looking in the right place? Don’t be afraid to start looking at your database. Knowing how to investigate and debug what your LINQ queries are doing in SQL Server is as important as the actual LINQ query in your .NET solutions. We will be looking at database server configurations, using MSSQL database profiling tools and understanding Query Execution Plans to get the most out of Entity Framework. In the end, learning to be an Entity Framework detective will make your project sound and snappy.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

Rider is a new cross-platform .NET IDE from JetBrains. In this talk we're going to spend our session seeing how you can be productive and work efficiently using the keyboard, focusing on the task at hand and not being distracted by the environment. We'll learn how to maximize the tool for your .NET and web development needs, as well as learn some hidden tips and tricks.

ASP.NET / .NET Core Medium (1 hour)

Entity Framework (EF) Core is the lightweight, extensible, and cross-platform version of Entity Framework, the popular Object/Relational Mapping (O/RM) framework for .NET. This talk will give a quick look at the new features for .NET Core 2.0. We will look at the new release, how to install it and show sample projects covering the following topics: • Improved LINQ Translation • Owned Entities and Table Splitting • Global Query Filters • DbContext Pooling • String interpolation in raw SQL methods • Explicitly compiled queries • Self-contained entity configurations in code first • Query types • LINQ GroupBy • Data Seeding

ASP.NET / .NET Core Medium (1 hour)

Creating a website with ASP.NET Core Internationalization will allow your site to reach users that speak more than English. ASP.NET Core provides services and middleware for localizing into different languages and cultures. This talk will also demonstrate how to change currency and date formats based on your user's location.

ASP.NET / .NET Core Long (1 hour, 30 mins)

ASP.NET Core 2.1 is a cross-platform web framework that can be deployed to Windows, macOS, Linux or even to Containers! It is the perfect framework to develop the Web APIs which drive the hottest web and mobile apps. The key is to have the right architecture in place to support the many benefits that ASP.NET Core provides. In this session, we will discuss how using the Hexagonal Architecture (or the Ports and Adapter Pattern) allows your APIs to work more efficiently by allowing a clear decoupling of the API architecture. We will also discuss Data Access (Synthetic or Production) and Data Domain implications and the API endpoints (Controllers) that have no knowledge of the Data Domain. Finally, we’ll discuss how different Data Access technologies can easily be switched out without impacting the Domain or API Endpoints and how this impacts testing. By using the Hex Architecture, your development story becomes easier, and your end user gets a much more stable API set to consume. We will discuss these concepts and get you started on using these tools with your ASP.NET Core 2.0 Web API projects.

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Cloud Architecture/Development 0

As developers start to build applications more and more rapidly using Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud solutions, they end up getting locked in or rewriting the application. Using containers provides the same benefits of easy access to technologies for experimentation and rapid development, without the lock-in. Containers provide you the flexibility to deploy on-prem or in the cloud, scale and manage with the same simplicity as many PaaS options. In this session, we'll build a multi-tier application using a combination of containerized technologies (Database & Queues) as well as custom built container based applications. The final outputs will be a Docker Compose file to start and run your application in one step, as well as a Jenkins build pipeline to build and deploy. Samples and demos of how the application can be deployed to public and private clouds will also be provided.

ASP.NET / .NET Core Medium (1 hour)

For years, those of us who wanted to use a Mac and do .NET or SQL Server development have been caught in a "worst of both worlds"-type of situation. We have had to use some sort of Windows VM, which negates the relative advantages of using a Mac (notably the battery life). The good news is that thanks to Microsoft's efforts, we can now do full stack .NET development without ever touching a Windows VM on our Macs! In this talk, I'll live code a simple service with database backend while introducing Mac-native tools such as Visual Studio Code, SQL Operations Studio and SQL Server for Docker. Along the way, I'll discuss key differences and limitations between the Windows tools and their Mac counterparts and talk about the difference between Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio for Mac.

ASP.NET / .NET Core Medium (1 hour)

DBAs lose sleep over ORMs touching their databases. Developers lose sleep thinking about using stored procedures. Is there a middle ground? Yes! I’ll introduce techniques and tools in .NET that let developers use ORMs while keeping the DBA happy. Talk to any DBA about ORMs and you’ll quickly find out all the things you like about ORMs are what DBAs don’t like. Interestingly enough, most developers I’ve talked to have issues with their ORMs, too. In this session, we’ll explore why ORMs cause such trouble using examples of bad behavior and poor performance with common application patterns. I’ll outline some strategies for mitigating those troubles such as making sure to audit the generated SQL and changing how we write application code to take advantage of how ORMs attack problems under the hood. Lastly, I’ll introduce some tools (and even yet another ORM) that help solve some of the worst of the problems we see in the database when using ORMs.

General Medium (1 hour)

How do we make sure the Junior Developers on our teams contribute positively? How do we guide them into becoming the best developers they can be? Managing people can be hard, but I'll outline strategies to help mentor new developers while teaching them to be independent, positive contributors in any circumstance. Along the way, we'll talk about learning styles, the need to be open to any questions and how and when to explain versus when to simply say "you'll have to trust me for now." These skills can be applicable in any project style or language, but we'll use Agile methodology and .NET languages for real life project examples.

General 0

Although software development is taught as a STEM out of Science or Engineering schools, it is as much an art or craft a creative process as a science. This presentation focuses on innovative problem solving techniques the tools and techniques to use when your normal process just doesn’t seem to get you to a solution. Much of the information in this talk is based on Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which, although it is focusing on Motorcycles, applies to all kinds of problem spaces (and Pirsig was a tech writer for IBM). These techniques have served me well over the years. The difference in art versus science approaches is actually supported by the way the brain works. * Traditional Problem Solving Methods, where they fall down * Eastern techniques, advantages, disadvantages * Tips * Specific examples * Brain versus Mind

General 0

Life would be so much easier if everything was in a database or pulled via API. But that is not the case. All too often we get data files (or have to send them) in various formats. This session discusses some of the tools available to help you figure out what the file looks like so you can pull it apart using those tools or your tool-of-preference. While the GNU version of these tools will be the focus, the skills learned apply to many different platforms. Being available on so many platforms gives you lots of choices. Your choices include Microsoft’s Bash under Windows 10, Cygwin under many Microsoft Windows versions, MAC OSX, the Linux core of Android, commercial Linux — like Red Hat Enterprise, and commercial UNIX — like IBM’s AIX or Sun/Oracle’s Solaris. Of particular interest are ‘head’, ‘tail’, ‘wc’, ‘awk’, ‘dd conv’, and shells. A few of the differences between UNIX/Linux and Windows will also be discussed to ease your shifts in our heterogeneous environments. This knowledge also comes in handy if you need to migrate code from an existing UNIX/Linux-based application.

General 0

Organizations have the need for data analyzers under a variety of job titles (Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Quantative Modeler, etc.). But finding those with the technical skills to perform those tasks with large volumes of data can be difficult. There is plenty of talent who have the necessary understanding to perform that analysis but may not have experience with the tools your organization is using (like SAS). When the schools fail in this area, one alternative is for the organization to assist individuals learn those skills and grow within the organization. Where it may not be acceptable to spend the learning time while at work using work resources, the use of SAS University Edition provides that opportunity. This version is available free of charge for non-commercial use (learning is certainly non-commercial). While oriented for the employer, the approaches can work for students who want to prepare for a job in this area as well as the educational institutions who will be training them. The session will cover: • Acquiring/installing SAS University Edition • Approaches for instructing/learning including "Brown Bag Lunches" and more formal training • Combining the informal training with formal courses for a more "Just in Time" result (and retaining the learning) • Motivating and rewarding employees for the learning activities • Advantages, disadvantages, tips and tricks • Quick First Program • Getting Data • Saving Data • Sorting • Control Breaks and Selection • Expressions • Important Options • Important and Interesting PROCs • Other Sources of Information

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

In SharePoint, Web Parts are an essential component of ASP.NET technologies used to present dynamic information to users and are arguably the most common customization created for SharePoint. In this presentation, we discuss and demonstrate how to build a web part using Visual Studio and its visual design tools. We'll create a visual web part and use LINQ to SharePoint to retrieve data from a SharePoint list to be displayed in our new visual web part. We'll then build and deploy our web part to a SharePoint site to see it in action!

DevOps / SDLC 0

All things cloud, we'll present the basics of what Cloud Computing is, how it's used, and what Microsoft offers. We'll delve into the Azure services and demonstrate creating Virtual Machines. We'll create Windows machines, Linux machines, and even a SharePoint farm made up of three servers, an Active Directory server, a SQL Server, and a SharePoint web front end.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) Medium (1 hour)

It seems like every day a new JavaScript framework is created and it can be overwhelming keeping up with them. This session will discuss some JavaScript libraries that make analyzing and displaying data a snap. We will discuss D3.js, CrossFilter.js, DC.js and jQuery DataTables.  These are very robust community supported libraries.  Use them in your client application to add interactive visualizations and data analysis tools.

Dev Tooling / ALM Medium (1 hour)

Over time even the simplest project can grow into an unwieldy beast. Features are added and removed. Developers come and go. Using static analysis tools we can get an idea about what challenges are in store for us. We will discuss how ReSharper, SonarQube and other tools can be used to expose any issues that may exist in our code base. This can help provide a fresh set of (computer) eyes to help keep your code base healthy

ASP.NET / .NET Core Medium (1 hour)

Visual Studio is a consistently great tool for developing applications on the Windows platform. In this talk we will discuss the productivity improvements added to Visual Studio 2017 that make it even better. Along with the improvements to Visual Studio, C# was also improved. We will also talk about the new language features introduced in C# 7. Starting in December of 2015, C# 7 was developed in the open with involvement from the community. We will talk about the results of that process.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Since roughly 1 in 7 people worldwide have a disability, a company cannot afford to exclude such a large demographic. Despite such high stakes, the solution simple! By learning the essentials on how assistive technology works and how to leverage existing HTML semantics, you can create an inclusive user experience that delights every user.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

An organization's journey to the cloud often starts with a lot of excitement and it can quickly lead to some confusion regarding the most effective path forward. Companies support tens or hundreds of applications, and what works for one application may not work as well for another application. There are so many options to get there, from a straight-forward re-host by moving your VMs to the cloud, to a re-architecture exercise, which will allow you to take full advantage of Cloud-only capabilities that enable scalability and ability to iterate quickly to deliver value to your users. This session will give you an overview of the different strategies to move to Azure, including a typical roadmap to get you from on-prem to a Cloud-first world. We will cover different compute models, such as IaaS, PaaS, and Serverless. As part of the cloud strategy, we will introduce DevOps best practices that will enable your team to innovate quickly and consistently. You will learn about Azure capabilities and migration strategies to go from on-premises to Azure. We will cover DevOps practices that will help teams deliver their applications to different compute models.

DevOps / SDLC 0

Teams go through an entire project without knowing if their applications work or compile anywhere other than a developer's machine. It's often thought that creating a Continuous build and release process is really difficult to do. By creating a robust Release Pipeline, you can reduce your team's cycle time and increase your ability to have a healthy codebase. We will use Team Services to create a continuous integration build and release process that will help you go from coding in Visual Studio 2017 to running your code in Azure in just a few simple actions. Your release pipeline with compile your code, run unit tests, create multiple Azure environments, run functional tests and load tests, and ensure that you have working and deployable software throughout your entire project. You will learn about the build and release system in Team Services, deploying infrastructure to Azure, and how to create a reliable process that will help you build quality into your software development process.

DevOps / SDLC 0

If you ask for a definition of DevOps, you are likely to get many different answers. Is DevOps someone's job title? Is it just Developers and Operations team sitting together? Is it automation? Is it yet another buzzword? In this session, we'll get a common understanding of DevOps and cover common mistakes that teams run into as they implement DevOps in their organization. DevOps encompasses a broad range of mindsets, practices, and tools that build upon organizational agility to take software delivery to the next level of maturity. Applied correctly, these are truly transformative: they accelerate and amplify feedback loops, shorten cycle times, optimize resources, enable quality and consistency, and foster collaboration and creativity throughout your organization. Some of the challenges that DevOps aims to fix include: • Limited human and/or technical resources for testing • Manual, ad-hoc, or inconsistent deployments • Resolving production issues may be slow and/or highly disruptive • Deployments are large and take a substantial periods of time to deliver • High infrastructure costs and/or budget constraints • Challenges in testing • Lack of collaboration between organizations such as business, IT, and Development You will learn about DevOps concepts and the path that an organization should take to implement DevOps practices. We will cover the ways that a company can start transforming their culture and defining the processes that enable DevOps. This session will teach you about the tools that you can use to get started on your DevOps path, including Visual Studio, Team Services, and cloud computing with Azure.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

Chat bots are turning up everywhere. Helpdesks, ordering a pizza, ChatOps, everywhere you look there's chat bots being created. How do you create your own successful chat bot? In this session Geert will explain how to build your own bots using .Net, C#, Azure and the Microsoft Bot Framework. During the session we will cover all areas involved in building a successful production ready bot. Starting from the initial idea to getting a prototype working as fast as possible to actually running it in production on channels such as skype, facebook or telegram. After this session you'll be fully ready to build your own bot that will conquer the world (if Sarah Connor doesn't stop it)

DevOps / SDLC 0

Building the right software solution for your customers can be hard. Requirements keep changing, user expectations keep changing, new technology is released. How can we keep up and adapt our software to these changing expectations? Devops is all about continuously delivering VALUE to end users. It can help us to overcome problems in building the thing users want and with great quality. In this session Geert will take you through a journey of optimising your mobile development process by automating most parts of your development cycle like automated builds, tests and deployments (to testers and production stores) so you can focus on building customer value. by including automation of the operations side like exception logging, user analytics and user engagement we can also improve our apps and adapt our apps to the ever changing user needs. In the demos Geert will show you how to automate these tasks using VSTS and Visual Studio App Center and the nice part is it works for native iOS, Android, UWP, Xamarin and React Native. Mobile developers unite!

Internet of Things 0

We’re living the halcyon days of tiny computers and JavaScript, but MIDI is a technology that’s been around for much longer. In this talk we’ll explore why it’s implementation and prevalence in musical hardware makes for a uniquely intriguing and accessible platform for creative coding. Tiny computers such as the RaspberryPi, Arduino and C.H.I.P. have finally reached a level of performance and affordability that makes hardware experimentation accessible to everyone. At the same time, JavaScript has emerged as the lingua franca of web programming and can be found in many places beyond just the browser. What if I told you there was a mature protocol that’s been around since 1983 and was uniquely poised to take advantage of this development? Well, wonder no more and meet MIDI! Sitting at convergence of these two things is MIDI — a niche protocol that’s been around since 1983 and was originally designed for musical instruments to communicate with one another. It’s event-oriented approach to messaging feels right at home in the asynchronous world of JavaScript & Node, and the prevalence of MIDI support in older musical equipment means you can find unique, hackable and affordable hardware at your local pawnshop or Craig’s List. This unlikely tech stack — Tiny Computers + JavaScript + MIDI — can lend itself to creative programming beyond music. George’s Talk will explain how to get started, walk through several examples and elaborate on the future of this stack, not only as a platform for experimentation but for education as well.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

One of the most popular blockchain application is Ethereum - a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts. During this talk you'll get familiar with things like blockchain basics, Ethereum Virtual Machine and Solidity - a high-level language for implementing smart contracts. Next we'll look at a Solidity Extension for Visual Studio and we'll use it to build a Smart Contract and deploy it on the Ethereum network using C# code via Nethereum - a .Net integration library for Ethereum

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

While Machine Learning (ML) is a very complex field of computer science and involves advances algorithms, Microsoft provides an easy to use service for machine learning and modeling via Azure Machine Learning Studio. During this session will present how to train a software model using data. For that we'll create an experiment, a model, will publish a predictive web service and finally will consume it.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

An application’s viewing support dictates feel, workflow and user acceptance. Join us to discuss how leveraging web browsers can add significant value to your solution and see how companies are optimizing their viewers to be the baseline for all types of workflow, regardless of the industry. Use this session as a source of ideas to add significant value to your application and increase your competitive advantage or internal efficiency.

General 0

It’s Friday night and you’re making your character for a fun evening of gaming. You’ve rolled your abilities and even got two 18s. But what class should you pick given your rolls? If you pick that class, is your character playable? What kind of character have you created? Or maybe you’re a game master and you’ve been running a game for some time. Do you need to know how much treasure that dragon hoard should have? Or are you wanting to figure out how many encounters your players will make it through in an evening so you can prepare enough material? These important questions can all be answered using machine learning. Many developers want to make use of machine learning in their applications but aren’t sure what sorts of problems can be solved with it. This talk will explain the sorts of problems that can be solved, what data is required to solve them, and what the results look like. And, we’ll explore it using fun and geeky examples. We will cover six major types of problems that machine learning can solve: regression, forecasting, impact analysis, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection. When we’re done, you’ll have a basic understanding of what machine learning can do and what you might want to use it for. I might even be something other than role-playing!

General 0

Bigfoot has been a staple of American folklore since the 19th century. The stories originate from Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest and likely go back centuries or more. The term sasquatch itself is an Anglicized derivative of the Halkomelem word sásq’ets. Many people are convinced that Bigfoot is real. Others suggest that he is a cultural phenomenon. Some just want to believe. There is even a group, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, that tracks Bigfoot sightings. They have data— thousands of reports—available on the Internet. And, where there is data, we can apply the power of machine learning. Let’s get to the bottom of this mystery! We’ll use machine learning to forecast the number of Bigfoot sightings for the coming months and years. We’ll measure the impact of key cultural phenomena—primarily the airing of The X-Files—on Bigfoot sightings. And, we’ll see if we can classify some Bigfoot sightings of our own using natural language processing. Not super-familiar with machine learning? Not a problem. We’ll explore the types of problems above (forecasting, impact analysis, and classification) and I’ll show you how to solve each of them using a little bit of code in assorted languages and the Nexosis API. So, come and get your feet wet (big or small) and begin learning about machine learning. The truth is out there.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Long ago, in the late days of the first Internet boom, before jQuery, before Underscore, before Angular, there was a web application built by a large corporation. This application was written as a server-side application using server-side technology like Java or PHP. A tiny seed of JavaScript was added to some of the pages of this application to give it a little sizzle. Over the ages, this tiny bit of JavaScript grew like kudzu. Most of it was embedded in the HTML in <SCRIPT> tags. Some of it was dynamically generated by the server-side code. Browser specific hacks were added. An AJAX call was added. jQuery was added. Helper functions were added. Lots of helper functions. So many helper functions. In time pyramids of doom built from anonymous callbacks and hundreds, nay, thousands of interdependent global functions ruled the day. And the programmers did despair. They cried to put the code under test that it might be refactored. "Add unit tests", they exhorted. But, lo, there were no units to test, only anonymous functions. Does this sound like your current application? I know I've worked on a lot of codebases just like this one. I've come up with some techniques to refactor them and put them under test (so the real refactoring can begin). In this session, I will share them with you.

General 0

Docker is a tool that can package an application and its dependencies in a virtual container to run on any computer. It helps enable flexibility and portability on where the application can run. ASP.NET Core is an open source, cross platform, performant, and scalable web application framework. The modularity and lightweight nature of .NET Core makes it perfect for containers. Today, I am going to give a brief introduction of Docker and show everybody how to run an ASP.NET Core 2.0 Application in Docker containers.

General 0

A Blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, and encrypted database for recording transactions. It becomes one of the technologies that got a lot of attentions this year. People even said that the Blockchain will become “the New Internet”. As software developers, we need to understand Blockchain, try Blockchain, and be ready for the disruption introduced by the Blockchain. I have been learning and trying Blockchain for a while. I founded a Blockchain club at my company. I created Blockchain Applications at Hackathons. Today, I am going to give a brief introduction of Blockchain and show everybody how to programming the Blockchain with .NET Core.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Understanding how our applications function in the wild is essential for developers when issues arise. With the power of knowledge, we can enable ourselves to provide the best experience to our fellow developers, and our stakeholders. One of the solutions that supplies this power is Application Insights. Application Insights is a service provided by Microsoft allowing you to monitor your application live, detect performance anomalies, and observe this data with powerful analytics. Together we will see how easy it is to add Application Insights to our applications, whether we have access to the code-base or not. Once instrumented, we will dive deeper into the capabilities of Application Insights and show how to leverage all the rich data collected from our application. Finally, as developers the last thing we want to do is troubleshoot an issue in Production, with everyone watching and the stakes are high. Watch as we monitor a live application that is throwing exceptions and how Application Insights can be used to help us solve the problem faster. When we are done, attendees will be empowered with the knowledge to leverage Application Insights to be more productive with their work.

General 0

In the ever-changing world of talent hiring, perks are king. To lure the best and the brightest to join their firms, more and more companies are giving their employees the option to work from home. This allows the individual to better control the their work-life balance. Though it sounds amazing at first, over time your professional responsibility can drift into your home life; causing issues around work/life balance. Every person that works from home takes the risk of working more - and more. Likely without even realizing it, like I did. My work from home story has highs and lows, and sharing where I have been successful as well as unsuccessful can help anyone considering the option. I have also had the opportunity to speak with colleagues who work from home as well, and I want to share what I have learned. With these exciting opportunities, it is important to declare early on what your priorities are; and how you can ensure you meet those priorities. After this discussion, people who attend this talk will have a new understanding of how people who work from home can be successful.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

In the dark, dystopian land of Web Development, it is hard to navigate the most productive way to build and deploy our applications. The over-saturation of "must-have" tools to make lives easier can cause decision paralasis when it comes to working on the web. But what if I told you there was a new gang in town, whose sole mission is to make it easier to get your apps to where they need to be. May I present an opinionated approach to developing web applications in the new world. Command-line interfaces are as old as time, so why would any sane person reccommend using a handful of them in the modern application development space? The answer is ease of use. Time and time again developers are forced to learn a new tool, investigate it's intricacies and master it. Than for no apparent reason, the tool doesn't serve it's purpose in a particular case, and it is thrown away, never to be used again. Simplicity and ease of learning is key to a tool being widely adopted and succuessful. Some may say that losing a graphical interface allows a tool to be more straightforward, and it's mission more apparent. During this session, we will use the power of the command line, with some help of Visual Studio Code, to create, develop, build and deploy an application to the cloud. Here is how we are going to accomplish this. Using Git Bash (it is a CLI after all), we will create a repository to store the code for our app, which will allow us to develop in a scalable way. Once our repository is created and configured, we will create a web service in ASP.NET Core using the dotnet cli, a tool created by Microsoft to standup and configure projects .NET developers are accustom to. After creating our service, we will add some endpoints to it using everyone's favorite free editor Visual Studio Code. Once our service is created, it would be great to have something to call this service and provide a rich experience for users. We will use the Angular CLI to build a Single Page Application that calls our new web service and also showcase some valuable features of the tool. Before we know it, we will have a web application that hits an Api, but it still has to be deployed somewhere. To do this, we will use the Azure CLI to create App Services and deploy our apps to them. And when all is over, our app and API are deployed to the cloud for all to enjoy. The best part of this approach is that it isn't tied to just development on Windows, and we will see this when we jump onto a Linux environment and make a change to our solution. Now we have everything we need to get our app to the right place, without all the pomp and circumstance that can exist. Beware attending this presentation may leave you with urges to forgot about GUIs completely.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Azure Media Services allows an organization to enhance accessibility, distribution, and scalability for video content. By leveraging Media Services, developers have the ability to develop feature rich solutions for video content management. Whether Video on Demand or Stream/Over the Air Broadcast the customization around how this content is delivered. Everything from custom encoding, thumbnail generation and content protection is handled gracefully with AMS and can be customized to your needs. This session will demonstrate the ease to upload and process videos using Azure Functions and Azure Media Services, and deliver these videos in a way where they are view able on the web using Azure Media Player. We will also take a look at live stream capabilities and broadcast ourselves during the talk.

General 0

Ever feel like you don't belong? Like your work just isn't as good as anyone else's? In this talk, I discuss what it means to be an imposter, something that almost everyone feels at some point in their careers. I discuss best ways I have found that I can manage my imposter syndrome and how I have overcome it at certain points in my career.

Internet of Things 0

Whether it’s called mixed reality, augmented reality, or virtual reality; changing the perceived reality of the user is here. This presentation will look at how to create IoT devices, send the data through the cloud, and use that data to drive a virtual or mixed reality experience. Creating applications that interact with the data created by the user’s environment should become straightforward after this introduction.

Internet of Things 0

The next evolution in cloud computing is a smarter application not in the cloud. As the cloud has continued to evolve, the applications that utilize it have had more and more capabilities of the cloud. This presentation will show how to push logic and machine learning from the cloud to an edge application. Afterward, creating edge applications which utilize the intelligence of the cloud should become effortless.

Mobile 0

The internet of things allows for communication with devices through various means (without touch, mouse, keyboard, or a screen). Mobile devices give users a dynamic interactive experience with these devices by communicating over several different wireless protocols or through the cloud. In this presentation, we will see how to use Xamarin to create a cross platform mobile application to control devices of all shapes and sizes. After this presentation, attendees should be able to create a basic mobile application and have that application communicate with peripherals over Bluetooth and the cloud.

Mobile 0

In this presentation, we will look at the how users interface with machines without the use of touch. These different types of interaction have their benefits and pitfalls. To showcase the power of these user interactions we will explore: Voice commands with mobile applications, Speech Recognition, and Computer Vision. After this presentation, attendees will have the knowledge to create applications that can utilize voice, video, and machine learning.

Cloud Architecture/Development Medium (1 hour)

Serverless is the new buzzword around the industry these days and has become a significant part of all major Cloud provider offerings. In this talk, we will walk through why you would consider using Serverless over something like a traditional deployment or something which leverages Docker. We will walk through creating serverless functions which can be deployed to both Azure and AWS with minimal changes using the Serverless.

ASP.NET / .NET Core Medium (1 hour)

WebAssembly is a new standard that is currently supported by the major browsers and the W3C, something which will augment JavaScript and allow for new integrations with other languages. Blazor is (currently) an experimental framework being worked on at Microsoft which attempts to, with the help of the Mono WASM runtime, allow developers to write pure client Single Page Applications (SPAs) in C# using .NET Core. In this talk, we will walk through the features of Blazor and how to use it.

Cloud Architecture/Development Medium (1 hour)

In this session we will walk through the considerations and thought process for planning and building a serverless microservice using Microsoft Azure Functions. Serverless functions are a great way to quickly build an event driven backend in the cloud that can support the majority of web use cases and provide a potential cost savings for hosting. Attendees will learn about the planning that goes into building a microservice like this and the decisions they need to make for their own implementations and what tools can help them solve problems.

DevOps / SDLC 0

Resource Manager Templates, AWS Cloud Formation Templates, Google Instance Templates all are great ways to codify infrastructure on their respective platforms. But, as production requirements evolve to support hybrid multi-cloud scenarios the complexity of managing multiple language paradigms and infrastructure state over time can be rather burdensome. Hashicorp Terraform and Consul solve both of these problems. Providing a cloud agnostic API paired with data-backed infrastructure state, this open source tool-set empowers developers to create and maintain infrastructure in the same code base as their application allowing them to maintain infrastructure, just as they do product code. In this presentation we'll review Terraform and Consul, discuss use cases and demo a running multi-cloud environment.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Kubernetes is quickly becoming the engine running high-powered container-based distributed system. Rancher is the rest of the sports car around that engine. An open source platform for enterprise-grade container management, Rancher enables Kubernetes everywhere with their provider-agnostic approach, simple UI and CLI tools that cover multiple workflows in an enterprise SDLC pipeline. This presentation will cover Rancher 2.0's Kubernetes-native feature set and demo a working Kubernetes cluster backed by Microsofts Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS/Azure Container Service 2.0).

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Calico is networking framework supporting cloud-platforms using CNI (Container Network Interface) plugins to support container orchestration solutions like Kubernetes, Swarm and Mesosphere. Enabling network micro policies, Calico enables developers and operations teams to define network policy in code, supporting ingress and egress control to a fine-grained level supporting advanced microservice-based architectures. In this presentation we will introduce Calico, some of its architectural use cases and explore some examples as well.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

There's a lot of talk about the .NET Core framework, but what about the .NET Framework for Windows? With the recent releases of .NET and the Windows 10 Updates, there are lots of improvements that you can use in your existing applications. Join us as we learn about the new features for Windows Forms, and ASP.NET developers in Visual Studio 2017 and Windows.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

ASP.NET developers have been using SignalR to build real-time web applications since 2013. Now, with ASP.NET Core 2.1, we’re bringing SignalR over to ASP.NET Core so you can build real-time web applications with all the benefits of ASP.NET Core like better performance and cross-platform support. Come learn about the new design and how to take advantage of the infinite scale of the Azure cloud that gives you a much more flexible platform on which to build the future of real-time .NET server applications.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

Come to this all-demo session to learn how to make the most of the Visual Studio debugger. We’ll tour almost all of the debugger, throwing in tips and tricks as we go along, and also calling out what is brand new in the latest version of the debugger in Visual Studio 2017. Whatever your experience level, we guarantee you will learn something new about debugging!

General 0

There's no such thing as a write-once application. The world is constantly changing, and our code needs to change with it. We'll think in small pieces and take a look at some principles and techniques that will keep our code manageable and understandable. Think about the developer who will come after you. Now, imagine that he's a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.

General 0

There's a lot of confusion about async/await, Task/TPL, and asynchronous and parallel programming in general. So let's start with the basics and look at how we can consume asynchronous methods using Task and then see how the "await" operator can makes things easier for us. Along the way, we’ll look at continuations, cancellation, and exception handling.

General 0

Do you want code that's maintainable, extensible, and easily testable? If so, then C# interfaces are here to help. We’ll take a look at how we can use interfaces effectively in our code -- starting at the beginning ("What are interfaces?") and then exploring why we want to use them. Along the way we'll use existing interfaces, implement own interfaces, and take a look at dynamic loading, unit testing, and dependency injection. All of which is made easier with interfaces.

General 0

Lambda expressions can be confusing the first time you walk up to them. But once you get to know them, you’ll see that they are a great addition to your toolbox. Used properly, they can add elegance and simplicity to your code. And some .NET constructs (such as LINQ and Task) lend themselves to lambda expressions. We’ll take a look at how lambda expressions work and see them in action.

General 0

Delegates are the gateway to functional programming. So lets understand delegates and how we can pass change the way we program by using functions as parameters, variables, and properties. In addition, we'll see how the built in delegate types, Func and Action, are waiting to make our lives easier. We'll see how delegates can add elegance, extensibility, and safety to our programming.

General 0

Bosses hate unit testing. They see it as code that doesn't contribute to the final product. And maybe you see testing that way as well. But here's the truth: unit testing makes us faster. You'll look at specific examples of how unit tests save time in the development process by letting us code more confidently, catch bugs earlier, and minimize manual testing. With this in hand, you can show your boss (and yourself) how unit testing makes us faster.

General 0

There's no such thing as a write-once application. The world is constantly changing, and our code needs to change with it. We'll think in small pieces and take a look at some principles and techniques that will keep our code manageable and understandable. Think about the developer who will come after you. Now, imagine that he's a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

ASP.NET Core is an open source and cross-platform web framework that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's lightweight and fast. Learn how to build web apps and APIs with the latest ASP.NET Core and how to deploy your apps to Azure using containers, Kubernetes, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with web apps and serverless using Azure Functions.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

NoSQL is not about saying "no" to SQL but "yes" to new possibilities. Learn what key/value, column store, document, and graph databases have to offer compared to traditional relational database models. See hands-on how to create your own databases in seconds that are geo-replicated, highly available and offer guaranteed rates of throughput without purchasing expensive servers or configuring virtual machines by taking advantage of the serverless Azure CosmosDB. Discover for yourself why NoSQL is being widely adopted and used in petabyte sized production databases that need to visualize data fast.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Serverless isn't about no servers, but less server concerns. Learn how to use Azure's serverless platform to build event-driven code that scales instantly using Azure Functions, connect disparate data sources and cloud-based resources and orchestrate complex workflows with Logic Apps, and architect applications that leverage a pub/sub platform with guaranteed sub-second latency that costs less than a dollar to process millions of transactions. Finally, monitor advanced telemetry, diagnose problems and build custom analytics with Application Insights.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

"On a scale of 1-5 (5 being 'expert'), how would you rate your JavaScript expertise?" What would happen if you were to have an in-depth technical interview on JavaScript RIGHT NOW? How well would you do? In this highly-interactive presentation I'm turning the tables on the standard "lecture and learn" style and putting you in the hot seat. Sure, the discussion will cover the concepts, patterns and practices of JavaScript experts, only I'll be asking the questions and everyone else will be giving the answers. This format allows plenty of room for everyone to participate however they choose, regardless of skill level or experience. In other words, feel free to join in the discussion, simply sit back, listen, and learn from the folks around you, or anywhere in between - your level of involvement is entirely up to you. Here's your opportunity to go on that really difficult technical interview, only in a much more forgiving environment where a wrong answer doesn't cost you the shot at your dream job. Are you game?

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

JavaScript is in your browser, your freezer and everywhere in between. Though it's true that today's world runs on JavaScript, the language was created with form validation and basic DOM manipulation in mind so it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to writing real-world applications with it. So much so that Douglas Crockford felt the need to write a book entitled, "JavaScript the Good Parts" and Anders Hejlsberg, the father of C#, decided to focus his decades of language development expertise into bringing JavaScript into the world of mature, respectable languages by creating TypeScript. In this presentation I'll show just what TypeScript is, how it relates to the concepts you already know today, and why you would might consider writing all your web applications in TypeScript rather than plain old JavaScript from now on.

DevOps / SDLC 0

In this session, we will show you how you can use standard DevOps practices such as infrastructure as code, continuous integration & continuous deployment, automated release and more in conjunction with Kubernetes (AKS) and Helm. For those who don’t know, Helm is a tool that streamlines installing and managing Kubernetes applications; it’s like homebrew for Kubernetes, but it’s also so much more. By the end of this session, you will understand how key DevOps practices tie right into container orchestration with Kubernetes and Helm. You will have more confidence and tools in your toolbox when it comes to Kubernetes. You will have a deeper understanding of what Helm is, how it came to be, and how it correlates to Kubernetes. After providing a brief, high-level overview of DevOps and Kubernetes/Helm, we will dive into a live demo showcasing how to get started with Kubernetes by deploying a Go app through a full CI/CD pipeline using a pre-configured Helm chart.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

How do you keep code consistent across a team or make sure your independent code follows accepted standards, use a Static Analyzer tool. See how to use some of these tools for your .Net, JavaScript, Style sheets, etc. to improve your code as an independent or large team lead. Whether you're an independent developer that needs assistance reviewing your code, or a member of a large team that wants to keep code consistency among the team, static analyzer tools can help identify and optionally fix issues in your code. Many platforms have their own version to help based on the language, including Roslyn, JsLint, CssLint, SonarQube. FxCop, StyleCop, etc. We'll take a look at some of these tools and explore how they can help identify issues in your code and improve maintainability and decrease errors before you deploy to production. We'll also look at the ability to build your own tool to enforce rules in your specific domain.

General 0

As our systems increasingly demand more real-time updates, we need better ways of working with these live streams of information. Traditional pull models fail to provide the real-time responsiveness and scale needs that modern systems expect. Moving to a push model allows us to scale easier and react to new data as it becomes available. SignalR facilitates push notifications over HTTP to a variety of clients. The Reactive Extensions were designed to allow for asynchronous LINQ over push based collections. In this talk, you’ll see how the synergy of these two technologies merge to make otherwise difficult tasks, a push over.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

We've been building event-based asynchronous applications for decades now, but traditional event based models suffer from complex nested callbacks, are difficult to mock and test, and struggle to manage synchronizing multiple streams. Reactive programming models can help to solve these challenges. Additionally RxJs considers the impact of time on these observables which facilitate simplifying gesture based recognition. With RxJs bundled into Angular, you'll see how you can use it to simplify traditional event-based programming models.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

With the cross-platform version of .Net, Microsoft has had to rewrite many of the core components that we have come to depend on. If you include data in your applications, chances are you have used Entity Framework in the past. In this session, you'll learn how to get started using EF Core and how to handle the changes in this version.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

The C# and VB compilers have been re-written from the ground up. Visual Studio now includes this new compiler and features new extensibility and language capabilities. In this session, we will focus on how these changes will impact you as a C# developer in your day-to-day development. We'll start with exploring the new language features. We'll then look at how to take advantage of code diagnostics and fixes that are publicly available. We'll end by exploring some of the extensibility points that you can take advantage of if you want to build your own diagnostics and code fixes.

General 0

An insider’s look at how to start establishing your voice as a thought leader and getting out into the big world speaking, writing, and otherwise spreading the Slalom brand throughout your local community and beyond. As a nationally recognized speaker and author of books and magazine articles, I can share my path and help guide others based on my experience.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Object Relational Mapping technologies, including the Entity Framework can drastically simplify the programming model against databases, but when done carelessly, performance can suffer. In this session, we'll explore some real-life strategies that have solved performance issues in production applications that I have encountered at a variety of customers. We'll discuss the pros and cons of working without stored procs and cover strategies for monitoring and tuning your entity queries.

General 0

As more of the world uses the magic of applications to get things done there is an ever increasing threat from those who would use your code to do harm. Security vulnerabilities are real and can have a significant impact on your employment. In this session we will review the most significant threats to your applications and learn techniques to harden your applications against them. We will also cover some techniques that can improve your security standing before you even write the first line of code.

General 0

Entity Framework, NHibernate and a number of other complex ORMs are available for .NET but what if you just need to move data from a database to an application quickly and simply? In this session we will review two lightweight data access technologies: Simple.Data and Dapper. If you don't need every single feature under the sun, these may be just the data access solution you are looking for. You will learn how you can take advantage of both the basic and complex the feature sets of these tools. You will also see how they can help you be more productive when you need to work with data in everything from one-off data transformation jobs through complex scalable data driven applications. See how you can build well architected and secure applications with these technologies, without having to spend valuable development time implementing a complex solution to a simple problem.

General 0

Unit testing has become an accepted part of our lives as .NET programmers. To help focus our tests to only the code we want to validate, Mocking Frameworks are a powerful tool in our toolbox. Like many tools, if you have an understanding of how the tool works under the hood, you can bend it to your will (and also know where it'll break if you bend too much). In this session, you'll learn about the two main types of mocking frameworks: constrained frameworks (like RhinoMocks and Moq) and unconstrained frameworks (such as Typemock Isolator and Telerik JustMock). I'll dig into how the two actually do their magic and we'll discuss the pros, cons, and limits of both. We'll look at examples of how to use the frameworks in your tests, mocking out dependencies from your own code and even third-party logic. You'll get the most out of this session if you're comfortable reading C# code and have a general understanding of class inheritance in .NET, along with some experience writing and running unit tests. Prior experience using mocking frameworks is not necessary.

General 0

You’ve hit your Visual Studio breakpoint, opened the watch window and you’re looking at a wall of nested collections and object graphs. You know the data you want is in there, but digging it out of the built-in data table UI feels like the “doing it the hard way” part of an infomercial. Now, imagine being able to shape your data the way that makes it easiest to understand and debug, limited only by your imagination (and time, of course). In this session, we’ll take a look at the Visual Studio Debugger Visualizer feature, available in all version of Visual Studio (even the free one!) that lets you create your own graphical display of your .NET data structures while debugging. Shape the data the way you want to make it easier to digest – hide unimportant info, quickly expose deeply nested elements, compare large object graphs, or even instantly search Stack Overflow for help with an Exception. Display it in whatever way is best for your data and your understanding of it, act on the data and even modify it from your custom view. We’ll talk through the options available to you, some of the limitations, and security risks/considerations involved. This session doesn’t require much deep knowledge of .NET, but the examples will primarily be in C#, WinForms and WPF. You don’t need to know any of those beyond what you can Google or find on Stack Overflow, though the results will be useful to novices and well-weathered developers alike.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

If you want to build a chat bot, it's likely that you'll want to put that chat bot on more than one chat platforms: Facebook, Slack, Skype, Cortana, SMS, etc. You use your favorite cross-platform mobile platform to create Android and iOS app with one code-base. What if you could do the same things with chat bot development? Join me as I show you how to use your existing web service development skills to build a REST service that acts as a chat bot. We'll use ASP.NET and the Azure Bot Framework to build a working chat bot, and then we'll expose it through several of the most popular platforms.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

Web API is the RESTful API framework for ASP.NET, now simply part of the MVC framework in .NET Core. With service layers becoming an increasingly important part of all kinds of different applications, getting better at implementing this layer of an application is becoming a critically important skill. Join me while I walk you through some of the coolest, most practical and useful things I've learned while developing services using Web API and ASP.NET. We'll look at some useful patters, amazing Nuget packages that save you lots of time and effort, tips, and even some anti-patterns that hold you back. Everyone should walk away with at least a few new things they can use to develop a better service layer in ASP.NET.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

If you've ever publish a .NET code library for reuse on different types of .NET projects, you're probably already familiar with some of the strategies for doing this on different flavors of the .NET Framework: multiple compiles, portable class libraries (PCLs), etc. Did you know that Microsoft has come up with a new standard that helps you share your libraries easily by targeting a new, virtual .NET Framework called .NET Standard? In this session, I'll show you how to write code that compiles once and can be shared across disparate environments--Mono for iOS and Android, Windows, Mac and Linux via .NET Core, and Universal Windows Platform (UWP). It can even be reused on versions of .NET that haven't been invented yet. If you want to publish a reusable component, or just need to share code in multiple project, come learn the new and better way to do it with .NET Standard.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

ASP.NET Core comes with its own built-in dependency injection (DI) framework. DI allows you to write better, more loosely-coupled code, and now with it built right into your favorite web development framework, you don't have to do anything extra to be able to use this important design pattern in your code. Already have your own favorite DI framework? No worries, you can use that too. I'll show you how to integrate a few popular DI frameworks into the highly-extensible ASP.NET framework. I'll show you how to do it all and show you examples in this session.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Ready to have your mind blown? What if the .NET Framework could be run as browser-native components and run faster than JavaScript? Hold on to your hats, friends, because with the advent of WebAssembly, not only can you can your run low-level assembly-like binaries at near-native speed in the browser, but now you can also recompile things like the .NET Framework and run-time into that format and run compiled .NET code... IN. THE. BROWSER! I'll show you how project Blazor brings C# and .NET into the browser--running natively no less, and without any plugins. Mind not blow yet? What if I told you it is faster than JavaScript? Still no? Ok, what if I was to show you how older browsers that don't know WebAssembly could still run this code. Would that interest you? Well, then join us for a wild ride with Blazor and WebAssembly.

General 0

The session will layout SSAS in 3 sections. First section is how the base server should be configured (explaining numa configuration, VM configurations, etc). The second section will go over the memory structures and how they relate the to underlying configuration. The third and final section will go over how the tabular model works, it's limitations, and finally tips to improve performance on very large data sets.

Cloud Architecture/Development Medium (1 hour)

Azure provides scalable, durable cloud storage, backup and recovery solutions for any data, large and small. We are going to take a look at some components/services of Azure to help us make our application more scalable. We’ll cover Blob Storage, Table, Storage, Queues, Application Insights, Web Jobs and Azure Functions.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) Medium (1 hour)

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework in the world for building responsive, mobile-first projects on the web. Let’s see how you can take your website to the next level using Bootstrap. We’ll start with a simple everyday site and add some “pop” to it with Bootstrap. We’ll make the site responsive, consistent, theme-able, mobile-friendly and pleasant to interact with. We’ll explore the grid layout, flexbox, typography, buttons, list and more.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) Medium (1 hour)

Ionic lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. The Ionic framework is a free and open source library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components along with tools for building highly interactive native and progressive web apps. Built with Sass, optimized for AngularJS. In this session, we’ll introduce you to the Ionic Framework. We’ll cover what the framework is, how you set up your development environment, what makes up the framework and the pieces of the framework. After this, you’ll be well on your way to building your first mobile application with the Ionic Framework.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) Medium (1 hour)

Ionic lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. The Ionic framework is a free and open source library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components along with tools for building highly interactive native and progressive web apps. Built with Sass, optimized for AngularJS. In this session, we will go beyond the “Hello World” application and build an application that uses most of the features of the Ionic Framework. We’ll cover everything you need to build your own application. Things like navigation, menus, toolbars, toast notifications, location support, and more. At the end of this session, you’ll have a good foundation for what is needed to build a native application using the Ionic Framework.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) Medium (1 hour)

Whether you like it or not, if you are building applications for the Web you are going to need to know JavaScript. Sorry, Flash and Silverlight! Unfortunately, JavaScript is not the easiest language to learn or to understand and the tooling for it is not really good. This is where TypeScript comes in. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that tries to solve a lot of these problems and make the code more structured, and less error-prone. And it also offers tooling support in a way that JavaScript just can’t.

ASP.NET / .NET Core Medium (1 hour)

ASP.NET Core is a newish open-source and cross-platform framework for building modern cloud-based internet connected applications, such as web apps, IoT applications, and mobile backends. ASP.NET Core apps can run on .NET Core or on the full .NET Framework. You can develop and run your ASP.NET Core apps cross-platform on Windows, Mac, and Linux. We’ll do a quick overview of ASP.NET Core, then we’ll build application or two using web API, web UI, and ASP.NET Core MVC.

ASP.NET / .NET Core Medium (1 hour)

Traditional or live debugging shows only your applications current state with limited data about past events. You either have to guess what happened based on your current state, or you have to recreate these events by rerunning your app. IntelliTrace expands this traditional debugging experience by recording specific events and data at these points in time. This lets you see what happened in your application without restarting it, especially if you step past where the bug is. IntelliTrace is turned on by default during traditional debugging and collects data automatically and invisibly. This lets you switch easily between traditional debugging and IntelliTrace debugging to see the recorded information. In this session, we will cover what event information Intellitrace collects, like debugger events, exceptions, .NET framework events and more. We’ll also dive in and see how you can further debug your application by using Intellitrace.

Cloud Architecture/Development Medium (1 hour)

Azure Application Insights helps you to detect issues, diagnoses crashes and track your application usage in your application, both web, and mobile. Let’s see how you can get alerts on performance and availability issues, monitor our applications usage and performance, get telemetry for our application without needing to redeploy the applications, search traces, and exceptions logs to figure out what is wrong. Oh, did I mention we can monitor Android, iOS, Windows Mobile applications as well as ASP.NET applications? We’ll also take a look at how we can analyze request load, server performance counters and response times across dependencies. Get multi-dimensional analyzes over standard metrics or define your own. Diagnose exceptions, mobile application crashes, and failed requests, correlating with events and traces.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) Long (1 hour, 30 mins)

Azure Application Insights helps you to detect issues, diagnoses crashes and track your application usage in your application, both web, and mobile. Let’s see how you can get alerts on performance and availability issues, monitor our applications usage and performance, get telemetry for our application without needing to redeploy the applications, search traces, and exceptions logs to figure out what is wrong. Oh, did I mention we can monitor Android, iOS, Windows Mobile applications as well as ASP.NET applications? We’ll also take a look at how we can analyze request load, server performance counters and response times across dependencies. Get multi-dimensional analyzes over standard metrics or define your own. Diagnose exceptions, mobile application crashes, and failed requests, correlating with events and traces.

Cloud Architecture/Development Medium (1 hour)

Failure IS an option! Developing cloud-first applications can be fundamentally different than building traditional on-prem applications. As a cloud app developer, you need to be prepared for and expect failures in your code as well as in your app environment. This session will arm you with tools to be proactive with fault tolerance and reactive with fault handling.

Cloud Architecture/Development Medium (1 hour)

Azure asset and subscription maintenance can be overwhelming. Attend this session to gain insight into how to create policies, implement role-based access control, and produce reports to keep the auditors happy.

Dev Tooling / ALM Medium (1 hour)

Delivering value is all that matters at the end of the day. This session will show you how to shift left and deliver value by automating development environments and components using local and cloud resources.

Cloud Architecture/Development Medium (1 hour)

Automation accounts are just the beginning. This session will cover creating automation jobs using Azure Automation Runbooks, Logic Apps, Functions, and PowerBI to make mundane tasks less of a chore.

DevOps / SDLC 0

In the cycle of a business or product feature making it into production, there are a lot of phases that the feature and code must go through as part of the development and deployment process. From initial code writing, building, and testing, to packaging, releasing, and finally, monitoring and measuring the production performance. In this talk we’re going to review one part of the typical DevOps cycle which is the “release” section. Specifically, we’re going to talk about how to create the infrastructure needed for a release in an agile, fluid manner. In fact, another way to define DevOps is “agile infrastructure”. We’re going to focus on a tool called Terraform by Hashicorp which allows us to easily define and create infrastructure resources using code and well-defined business rules. At the end of this talk, attendees should have a good basic understanding of how Terraform works and how it can help them make their infrastructure more agile.

DevOps / SDLC 0

DevOps is the secret sauce behind today's most successful development teams and companies. Join Microsoft Cloud Solutions Architect Louis Berman as he shows you how to speed your race into the cloud; in many cases by as much as 10x within a single year. In this demo-heavy session Mr. Berman will demonstrate how very easy it is for every organization to adopt DevOps, but just as importantly he’ll also focus on the soft-skills needed to “sell” DevOps to your clients and peers. The session will conclude with Mr. Berman’s “Top 10 Tips for DevOps Success!”

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Azure’s serverless story makes it dead simple to decompose your clunky monolithic apps into performant DevOps-friendly microservices. Join Microsoft Cloud Solutions Architect Louis Berman as he shows you how to build and deploy a significant cloud-scale application by live-coding a real-world example of automating employee on-boarding to the Microsoft Graph as a serverless app. As a bonus he’ll also show you how to get a handle on your serverless workloads through DevOps.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

"Oh no! I just typed something into git and now my work is gone! Ahh!" Don't panic. Contrary to popular belief, git is one of the most non-destructive version control systems available. When used right, git never loses any data, and even when misused, chances are very high you can still recover. This talk will present turn-by-turn directions on how to recover from a wide array of common git mistakes, and also provide some workflows to minimize them. Examples include, but are not limited to: * Changing spelling errors in commit messages. * Split commits into multiple commits with logical separation. * Combining multiple commits into one. * Resetting the base commit when you accidentally branch off of the wrong branch. * Recovering from merge conflicts. As well as more advanced topics, such as: * Extracting parts (e.g. sub-directory) of a repository as a new repository. * Merging multiple repositories into one while retaining version history. * Removing confidential data accidentally committed.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

Java, Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, JRuby, Jython, Clojure. What do all these languages have in common? They are all powered by Java Bytecode. With the current ecosystem of languages running on the JVM, it is becoming important to learn more about the least common denominator. This talk gives an introduction to Java Bytecode, with practical examples and an implementation of a very simple JVM based language.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

This talk introduces the concepts of distributed version control, using git. Topics include: - Getting to know the repository - Staging and committing - Pushing and pulling - Branching - Merging - Solving conflicts

DevOps / SDLC 0

This session will show you how to set up build & release pipelines in VSTS using YAML & ARM templates and keep these parts of your project under source control. I will demonstrate how to enhance security by using Azure KeyVault & PowerShell to set application secrets (connection strings, config settings, etc.) as part of the release process. In addition I'll go over setting up CI/CD builds, quality gates for releases, and using VSTS to deploy to on premise servers. Control costs by automating your releases and standing up environments as needed!

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Bots are a powerful new application platform. This talk will introduce the basics of the Microsoft Bot Framework and show 5 different ways to create a bot in just minutes!

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

This session will dig deep into the rich functionality of the Microsoft Bot Framework. It will demonstrate how to manage state, integrate a bot with Cognitive Services, how Adaptive Cards can be used, proactive & reactive bots, and how bot channels work.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Azure Functions let you concentrate on what matters - your code - and get charged only when that code is executed. This session will teach you the pros & cons of Azure Functions (including durable functions) so you will be able to add this powerful new tool to your toolbox.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

Since its release in 2015 VS Code has become one of the most popular editors in the world. Using extensions it can be used as a SOL client, REST tester (like Postman), Azure App Services & Functions manager, Azure Storage browser, and as a Git history brower. It can replace your terminal, PowerShell ISE, and markdown editor. With the right extension it provides quick links to your VSTS repository & work items. It can sync your settings across multiple devices & platforms. This session will show you how to use VS Code like a boss!

General 0

Technical advice and assistance is one way we are capable of giving back to our local communities. If you have ever attended a GiveCamp or a hack day for non-profits come see what Microsoft Philanthropies has to offer that will help you to help them even more.

General 0

When working on dynamic teams, sometimes it feels like we're not all speaking the same language. Software engineers, product owners, designers, project managers and others all have different priorities, ways of thinking, and understanding of concepts. This talk will present some strategies for bridging the gap (or gaps!) in communication among various team members so all team members can move forward feeling confident that they are all on the same page.

General Short (30 mins)

Humans are designed to be in a community. We will not thrive without having others around us. They provide perspective, expertise, and diversity. Inside of technology we take advantage of communities and form teams in order to accomplish huge projects. Something that would take one person a lifetime to build can be built in just a few weeks with a team. We see the benefits of doing this in a technology company, but we may miss the benefit of this approach in our personal lives. In technology teams we have business analysts, engineers, and quality team members. We actually have the same roles in a personal development too. This talk will discuss how we as people interact within a group and community and view it in light of development teams to help everyone interact and build things (and themselves) faster, stronger, and better!

General 0

A client recently said, “machine learning is no longer the future, it’s the present and we need to understand where and how to make the best use of it." During his discussion, Michael will present insights into where machine learning is being most readily absorbed as well as some suggestions on where to start and why. Michael will also reveal his four-step process (educate, isolate, experiment, implement) for building out organic machine learning teams with the help of external data scientists and analytics experts.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Imagine writing custom tags without jumping into a morass of JavaScript and framework dependencies. Mithril's small API (and learning curve), safe-by-default templates and neck-snapping performance are a step up from bulky, opinionated frameworks. Mithril makes application code discoverable, readable and maintainable. It's tiny at 7.8 KB (yes, 7.8 KB) with no dependencies. Mithril goes toe-to-toe with the big boys including advanced capabilities like transclusion, computed properties, and nested custom tags. And it's fast. Benchmarks show it to be faster than React, Angular or Vue. If you're frontend programmer, you really owe it to yourself to check out Mithril. You'll understand it entirely in an hour and wonder why you didn't discover it sooner.

General 0

This is a high level overview of digital accessibility. The focus is on typical problems people with disabilities might experience online. Using a combination of behavioral changes, free or low cost tools, developers can improve their products. Designing for accessibility may be the only way some people can experience what we've built. Yet, sometimes it's a matter of realizing that while we're building bridges, we leave barriers in the way. This session is for product owners, designers, client-side software developers and QA testers. The topic is on testing with a focus on a more inclusive ideal on the end user's perspective.

General 0

If accessibility is essential for some and useful for all, then why is it regarded as a feature instead of a requirement? Why do we have the perception that accessibility is so difficult to design and develop for? And how does compliance actually fail people with disabilities? To answer those questions, let’s reframe the conversation. Instead of focusing on compliance, let’s look at the personal and cultural changes we can make that will influence our work. With that, we'll come to an understanding of where we fail the people who may need us most. When thinking about my history as a developer, I regret much of my attitude and inexperience. I’ll share real-life anecdotes of working with engineering teams from the perspective of a developer-turned-accessibility specialist. We’ll look at the ways that we miss opportunities to be more inclusive designers and ways that we put up barriers between us and the people we want to reach–but also how we can clear the path. Because when it comes to accessibility, everyone has a role and a social responsibility.

General 0

This is an introduction to accessibility and common assistive technology. Discussion will focus on how people with disabilities navigate digital experiences. As creators, we often leave unintended barriers between people and content. I will highlight everyone's roles and responsibilities in maintaining fair and equal access. This is an informational session and open discussion for anyone new to the concept of digital accessibility. It is relevant for people who want to design or build better, more inclusive experiences and products. The goal of this session is to empower and enable others to bring accessibility advocacy back to their work and organization.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Microsoft's Azure Stack is an extension of Microsoft Azure in your on-premises datacenter. A primary use-case of Azure Stack is the deployment of hybrid applications that span both the Azure public cloud and your Azure Stack instance. In this presentation I will walk you through an example of how to deploy a hybrid application, monitor it, and maintain it. I will also highlight some best practices, common pitfalls, and lesson learned.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Azure Stack is an extension of Microsoft Azure in your on-premise datacenter. If you want hands-on experience with Azure Stack, you can use the Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK). The ASDK is meant to be deployed on bare metal, but not everyone has such a robust piece of tin lying around. In this session I will show you how to deploy the ASDK on a nested virtualization platform, and what the next steps are to prepare the ASDK for testing and development. By the end of the session you'll be ready to deploy the ASDK yourself on Microsoft Azure or your own datacenter.

DevOps / SDLC 0

Deploying infrastructure from code is awesome! Hand editing JSON files is not. In this session you will learn about some of the shortcomings of AWS CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager Templates, and why I chose to use Terraform instead. I will demonstrate how to convert an existing ARM template to a Terraform configuration, highlighting the use of modules and variables. In addition, you will learn about some of the limitations of Terraform and potential workarounds.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

If you've heard of TypeScript, but don't know much about it, then this talk is for you. We'll start at the very beginning and discuss what TypeScript is, where it came from, why it exists and what you can do with it. We'll cover the basics of the language, it's relationship to JavaScript, and It's object model. We'll start from nothing and write code as we go to demonstrate everything covered.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Heard of Angular but aren't sure what it is? Want to get a ground-floor look as this powerful and broad-ranging framework? In this talk we'll cover everything from the ground up. We'll code a basic application, covering all the parts and features of Angular, including the Command Line Interface, TypeScript, the structure of an Angular application, and how you can piece together components to build a single-page application.

General 0

Every development organization strives to evaluate the effectiveness and productivity of developers. Numerous different attempts have been made at objective measurements, but most have been found lacking. In this presentation we'll discuss if you actually can measure developer productivity and discuss the best ways to evaluate developers.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

TypeScript is a fully OO superset of JavaScript. As a result, it can do everything you'd expect from an OOP language. In this talk, we'll demonstrate those things, including encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, the SOLID Principles, and Mixins. All demos will naturally be done in TypeScript.

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

Dive into code signing and learn why you want to be attaching signatures to your code and how to quickly and securely incorporate code signing into your CI/CD pipeline.

General 0

Learn how to modernize your line of business application with the latest desktop features.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Does it take you days to deploy your infrastructure? In this session we are going to introduce you to Azure Resource Manager and demonstrate how we create Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates using Visual Studio and then deploy the infrastructure to Azure in minutes. We are going to peek under the covers of the ARM templates to show you what is going on inside the template and why you should be implementing it today. We will look at the Azure portal and walk through the infrastructure we deployed. Lastly we will look at the Azure Resource Template Visualizer and show you a great way to use it to get you started with ARM template creation.

General Medium (1 hour)

Dev Ops is a hot topic these days and there are many tools to work with. In this session we are going to show how Visual Studio Team Services is able to address all the stages of the Dev Ops lifecycle from Project Management to Build and Releasing software. Join us as we show you how the integrated tools set can make you successful in your Ops journey.

DevOps / SDLC Medium (1 hour)

Learn how the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) team at Microsoft has changed their approach to building software and services by adopting an Agile culture and mindset. Paul Hacker takes you on a journey of contrasting the “old way” with the “new way”, and shares key changes that contributed to the transformation including thoughts on teams, roles, sprints, planning, and learning.

General 0

Microsoft Azure is a powerful platform with amazing services available at your fingertips! However, it can also be hard to know which services to pick when you’re getting started with cloud application development. In this session, we cover how to get started with cloud development in Azure using the five most common services that most applications need to run in the cloud. We'll show .NET but this works for Node, Java, Ruby and Python too!

General 0

This session will be a deep dive session on Azure Password Writeback feature. Azure Password Writeback is a self-password reset feature for Hybrid configured customers. This will reduce the password reset calls to helpdesk in any company. In this session, we will talk about the architecture of it and demo it.

General 0

This session will demo the Timesheet application. This is a classic example of using SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow together and making an internal approval application for any organization. This session will show Office 365 is just not a place to use messaging and SharePoint services rather we can do more and create some applications like Golden Five Time Sheet App.

Mobile Medium (1 hour)

If you are a C# developer and need to build a line of business cross platform mobile application, Xamarin and Xamarin Forms should be your tools of choice. But if this is your first time, how do you know if you have made solid choices in your application architecture? In this session, you will receive guidance on using Xamarin and Xamarin Forms (open source platform for building native mobile applications) to create an application architecture that will support not only the delivery of your application but future application maintenance and feature additions. Topics discussed: Dependency Injection, Component Communications, Validation, Navigation, Accessing Remote Data, Security, Configuration Management, and integrating 3rd party UI components.

Mobile Medium (1 hour)

In the circles of web development, “Mobile First”, developing for mobile clients before considering desktop clients, has become an accepted approach to delivering solutions. It is the recognition that many application users are using their mobile device as the primary tool for utilizing software. In some scenarios, the mobile web experience falls short of the user experience expected. As a result, there is a large demand for native mobile applications. With combining the features of Xamarin and Azure, software providers can deliver cross platform, globally scalable, and secure native mobile applications for the most popular mobile platforms. Utilizing existing skills, developers can significantly reduce time to market and capitalize on the growing trend of mobile devices as a primary tool to use software and consume data. In this talk, we will explore how Xamarin can be used to leverage your existing skills to deliver fully native mobile applications for the most popular mobile platforms. In addition, we will add Azure Mobile Apps to our solution to provide the backend data store for data synchronization, user authentication, and support push notifications.

General Medium (1 hour)

For any non-trivial application created today, software engineers must not only deliver on application features but also include associated unit tests to improve efficiency, to reduce risk when making code changes, and to improve quality by identifying bugs as early as possible. One may think having unit tests to increase code coverage is the goal but that is missing the mark. Software engineers should be focused on delivering unit tests that have meaningful value to support current and future software development. In this session, you will learn several unit test styles, how identify weaknesses in unit tests, and how increase the value of the unit tests you create.

General Medium (1 hour)

Most developers have the responsibility of working with an existing codebase. In many circumstances, the existing code was not designed with testing in mind. This does not allow leveraging of automated testing to reduce risk and improve quality. To realize the value of automated testing, this existing code must be refactored which is not always easy to accomplish. By attending this session, you will learn several techniques to refactoring code that was not designed to be testable. In addition, unit test will be added to the newly refactored code and executed as a part of an automated test suite.

General Medium (1 hour)

Developers today have the tall task of writing code for the entire software stack which includes front-end, back-end, and data layer (SQL) code. While most seasoned developers have a certain comfort level in writing efficient code for both front-end and back-end layers of an application, the data layer (SQL) code tends to fall short. If Microsoft SQL Server is your database platform and you are not an expert at SQL, this session is for you. We will explore Plan Explorer, a free tool from SentryOne, and use it to improve the performance of slow executing queries on Microsoft SQL Server.

General 0

The Microsoft Data Platform is being developed and released at a speed and frequency like never before. Each release brings hundreds of new updates and features that could improve the data tier of your application, often with minimal changes to your existing queries or database schema. However, it can be nearly impossible to keep up, especially when there's no dedicated DBA on your team. In this session we'll talk about 5 things a developer or part-time DBA can do to improve application performance with just a few changes and how to measure the impact of your work. Starting with some tricks that will work as far back as SQL Server 2008, we'll touch on each release through 2017, demonstrating something that was added or changed to help improve your database layer. If you have never moved beyond ORMs or basic CRUD in SQL Server, come learn how to think more like the database and enjoy working with your data again!

General 0

For years, database design and creation in the SQL Server community has largely been managed by expensive third-party tooling or many homegrown scripts specific to the task at hand. Even today, many development shops still haven't successfully migrated their database development to source control, forgoing the opportunity for true Agility and collaboration. It doesn't have to be this way! In this session I'll introduce you to SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) for managing a database project in Visual Studio. SSDT database projects provide powerful tooling to increase your effectiveness and efficiency as a DBA. We'll spend the entire session in Visual Studio starting new projects and importing existing databases, demonstrating how the tooling works, reviewing the best tips and tricks to achieve success, and finish by showing you the most important options that will help to modernize your current processes. You'll leave the session ready to transform the way you manage SQL Server database development!

DevOps / SDLC 0

As the DBA for an Agile, Sprint-based team, you may feel like the bottleneck at every turn. You’ve stuck with the existing processes and tools because it’s what you know. After all, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Right? I have good news! With only a few new skills and free tools from Microsoft, you can join the Agile & DevOps revolution to help accelerate your team, product, and data infrastructure. In this session I’ll use the newest version of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) to model an existing database and then demonstrate each step from modification to a working, automated deployment. I’ll highlight the configuration options that matter most, provide solutions for overcoming common problems across environments, and show you what to do once the release is ready for production. After seeing the possibilities, you'll be ready to change those old processes. And in no time at all, you’ll be the talk of the team as they try to keep pace with you!

General 0

Your company uses Power BI for many projects and reporting needs, and often you're the one who finds, gets and cleans the data in order to make it useful. Wouldn't it be better if you could create a plugin for Power BI Desktop that would enable them to import the data, pre-cleaned and ready to use?   In this session I'll demonstrate how to use the Power Query SDK with Visual Studio to create a new plugin for Power BI Desktop. We'll cover Power Query basics and additional features available through Custom Data Connectors. Then I'll step through a simple end-to-end example that pulls data from an external web service. I’ll conclude with examples of more advanced connectors to provide inspiration for the data mashups you and your clients desire.   You'll leave this session with enough knowledge to create your first connector and solidify your superhero status in a data-hungry world.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

React has been on your radar for some time but you don’t know the best way to dive in to the ecosystem. There are so many awesome libraries but it’s hard to distinguish between what’s necessary and what’s addressing a pain-point you don’t yet have. In this talk, we will consider some strategies for learning React and some of React’s core principles. From there, we will discuss how taking a component-based view of our front-end can help us build an application architecture that scales over time. Finally, we’ll examine some important libraries in the React ecosystem and what problems they are working to solve.

Mobile 0

You’ve been tasked with creating a new mobile application. You look through the requirements and quickly realize that unlike other apps you’ve made in the past for a single client, you need to be able to quickly customize this for other companies with new branding and functionality. What now? In this talk, we’ll go over some strategies that I have employed to build a custom, white-label application in React Native that is deployed as many, unique applications in the Google Play store and Apple App Store. Some of the concepts we will cover include Dependency Injection, Styled Components, and configuring parts of the React Native CLI. Light knowledge of React and React Native would be helpful but not necessary to get value out of this talk.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

As front-end developers, we oftentimes don’t have algorithms top of mind unless we’re brushing up for an interview. Why should we care about these sorts of things, our frameworks and utilities like lodash often take care of everything we need, right? In this talk, we’ll take a look at why we should care about the algorithms we use in our applications and how we can take advantage of work in other areas of programming. From there we will examine some common things we can do to make our applications both more performant and easier to change over time.

General 0

Creating a solid architecture for any system we design can be a challenging process. The frameworks we use often include some opinion about how our software should be designed but these guidelines may not always be the best for the long-term health of our application. In this talk, we’ll discuss how taking a feature based approach to our application architecture can help us clearly structure applications that scale well over time. Additionally, we will talk about how we can apply these concepts to both the front-end and back-end to promote a consistent mindset across the entire tech stack. All examples will be using .NET Core and React but the concepts apply well beyond these technologies.

General 0

Technical developer evangelism is no longer a role that you have to explain – it is critical to the success of most software product companies. And the craft has evolved over the past few years – come learn the many nuances to be successful. Take away 20 well-accepted tricks of the trade applicable to all developers – with real world evangelism examples and resources. How do you stay humble while making a name for yourself? How do you create a niche, write well, speak well and move the needle? Come be awesome!

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

.NET feels like a breath of fresh air. Changes in the .NET developer ecosystem usher in a new era and align to modern web/mobile/desktop development. And developers can target just about any platform and any device with .NET. Let’s unpack the magic and talk about: • Various .NETs • .NET Core • ASP.NET Core • Xamarin across Platforms • Open source all things • Cross-Platform Tooling • .NET Standard • Web Assembly • Moving frameworks forward Join in as we explore all that’s new & shiny. This is one of the best times to be a .NET developer – let me show you why!

Mobile 0

Cross-platform mobile development has been democratized for .NET developers – thanks to Xamarin & Microsoft. Let’s build a cool aviation app together – targeting all platforms from the comforts of Visual Studio on Windows or Mac. Real world apps need cloud data connectivity, navigation, storage, lifecycle management, plugins and polished UI – let’s do all that. Let’s take a look at some must-have tooling for professional Xamarin developers. Let’s dip into device capabilities, reuse libraries and elevate the user experience. Oh, and we will throw in some passion for aviation in the app, like private jets and supersonic possibilities. Loads of fun while learning cutting-edge mobile development – you in?

Dev Tooling / ALM 0

So you are a Mobile developer? Looking for sanity amidst a plethora of platforms, frameworks and tooling options? Wondering if Visual Studio is the right IDE for you? Let me convince you why .. let’s talk: • Visual Studio for Windows & Mac • Easy getting started experience • Mobile to Cloud end-to-end tooling • Emulator/Simulator choices • Live deployments and device testing • DevOps with Visual Studio App Center • Polished UI through Extensions Visual Studio is the epitome of Microsoft's 'Mobile First, Cloud First' mantra. With rich tooling for mobile developers across Windows and Mac, Visual Studio is paving the way for true cross-platform mobile development from a single rich IDE.

Mobile 0

Cross-platform mobile development has been democratized for .NET developers – thanks to Xamarin & Microsoft. However, professional Xamarin development isn't a piece of cake. Sure, tooling has come a long way, but successful mobile apps need a lot more. Do you understand the whole Xamarin technology stack? Do you know what platforms to target & maximize code reuse? Let’s do a run-down of the essential tools, frameworks and utilities that should be in every Xamarin developer’s arsenal. The ubiquitous IDEs, necessary plugins, cloud backends, deployment tools, testing solutions and polished UI – all ready for your app development pleasure. How about adding some cloud-powered AI or Alexa voice assistance to your app? What can you do to delight your users, maintain developer sanity and deliver high quality apps? Let’s stop reinventing wheel and ship apps faster – the right tools help!

Mobile 0

You’ve heard the buzz – target every mobile platform from a single C#/XAML codebase. Sounds too good to be true? The story is actually even better - let’s unpack the promise of Xamarin.Forms. The reach goes beyond just mobile platforms of iOS, Android & Windows – did you know your Xamarin.Forms apps could target MacOS, Smart Watches, Smart TVs, Refrigerators & Hololens? And it’s not just futuristic devices or platforms, you could take Xamarin.Forms goodness back to WPF & even Web! This isn’t utopia, but an absolute reality today. Let’s dive into each platform and unearth the magic behind the cross-platform development democratization for .NET developers.

DevOps / SDLC 0

Do you want to make your deployments risk free? Do you want to deliver business values to your customers faster? Do you want to increase the efficiency of your Team? Are your application and database deployment separate processes? Do you encounter issues while deploying your database changes? Do you want to automate your testing process? Is your database slowing you down? If the answer to any of the above questions is a Yes, then this presentation is for YOU. Come join me in this session to understand the problems with traditional database development, why organizations are moving towards achieving Continuous Integration and Database DevOps, the problems it tries to solve and learn about the toolsets which will assist you in this journey towards painless database deployments.

Cloud Architecture/Development 0

Serverless computing gave us a lot of cool features but took away some basic items like state management. You could implement your own state management but this often failed in complicated scenarios like chaining functions, running a monitoring service, running MapReduce and, especially, waiting for external input (like human input). Not only will we discuss how to manage state in these scenarios but we will even write a simple MapReduce sequence using Durable Azure Functions

Cloud Architecture/Development Medium (1 hour)

Do you work on ASP.NET and/or SQL Server (or other RDBMS) full time? Have you ever wanted to dip your toes into the NoSQL world without having to install and configure a bunch of tools and services? Ever wonder what all this hype surrounding Azure CosmosDB is? The first half of this session involves a gentle intro to the NoSQL world and the CosmosDB platform. The second half of this session will be a quickstart tutorial for building a ASP.NET MVC CRUD application in C# using the CosmosDB platform.

Cloud Architecture/Development Medium (1 hour)

Remember the scene from The Matrix where Neo goes "I know ... Kung Fu". Consider this your "I know ... Kung Fu" moment but for Serverless. These days some of the best solutions are Serverless - code executing in the cloud, reading and writing data to datastores in the cloud, without having to worry about minuate like the data schema and scaling issues. This talk goes beyond the Serverless hype and discusses some use cases and practical implementations for truly going Serverless using Azure Functions, CosmosDB and C#.

Cloud Architecture/Development Long (1 hour, 30 mins)

Azure CosmosDB is a globally distributed, massively scalable, multi-model database service. But what is actually inside the engine that makes it tick? This is a full-on, fast and furious, deep-dive into the inner machinations of this "made-for-the-cloud-age" database service, one that will leave you gasping for air and wanting more.

General 0

TechBash Keynote

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

It's an exciting time to be a C# developer! C# is now an open source project with a new modern compiler which makes it easier and quicker than ever before to evolve the language. In this session, we'll review recently released features, demonstrate what's scheduled for the next release, and explore the concepts under consideration for future major milestones.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

ReactJS is a powerful library that makes it easy to build, reason about, and organize HTML user interfaces. The library is very fast and efficient, but you can encounter issues at scale if you don't know what to look out for. In this session, we'll build a simple single page ReactJS app and explore how to use tools and libraries to measure and then optimize performance.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

Picking up a new framework with a new design paradigm can be daunting. You hear familiar names being tossed around (Components, Libraries, Objects), but they're being used in new and mysterious ways. In this talk we'll cover what some of these pieces are, how they're different, how to use them properly, and, most importantly, how they fit together as pieces of a greater whole. Come see why the Angular way of doing things is awesome (and easy).

NodeJS 0

Node provided a way to bring JavaScript out of the browser and on to server and desktop. In addition to building web applications, now you can build command line interface applications using JavaScript! Come explore some tools and libraries that will help you in your development, and even learn how to complete an OAuth flow from the command line.

NodeJS 0

Traditionally, when developers see large arrays of data their "go to" tool for parsing and searching has been the for loop. But JavaScript provides a more declarative approach that can help you find what you're looking for in fewer lines of code that is cleaner, easier to read, and maintain. Come see how the map(), reduce(), and filter() functions can help you!

ASP.NET / .NET Core Medium (1 hour)

Akka.NET is an Actor Model Framework that helps .Net developers create powerful concurrent & distributed applications more easily. The Actor Model is a well-established paradigm for building fault-tolerant and scalable applications that has recently seen a resurgence as distributed and asynchronous systems gain popularity. In this introductory talk, Sean will walk you through the concepts of the actor model, its benefits over traditional approaches, and the basics of how to use Akka.NET to achieve these advantages in your .NET applications.

DevOps / SDLC Medium (1 hour)

Sean Killeen is going where no presenter should ever go – a live demo! Continuous integration and automated delivery are considered best practices, but how does it actually happen? During this talk, Sean will create – from scratch – a CI/CD pipeline for a real project using TeamCity, OctopusDeploy, and the Azure cloud. Along the way, we’ll discuss Chocolatey, deployment slots, nuget packages, and more. We’ll also touch on Appveyor and some other Azure deployment methods, as well as the “why” of CI/CD.

Dev Tooling / ALM Medium (1 hour)

Too many developers underestimate the power that is hidden away in their logs. In this talk, I will take us through the “why” of structured logging and the basics of how to attain it via Serilog and Seq, with plenty of examples along the way. You’ll learn how to log better, how to search those logs, how to use logs to identify performance issues, and how I once substituted log messages for an entire UI in order to provide business value quickly.

General Medium (1 hour)

Working in an agile mindset – especially when favoring specific approaches – can go wrong in about 100 ways. In this talk, I describe some lessons as a technical lead working on agile teams, holding it together with duct tape and a little help from my friends.

General Medium (1 hour)

Modern development shops are fast discovering that tables & rows aren’t the only way to store data. In this talk, I introduce .NET developers to the advantages of graph databases using Neo4j. You’ll learn how graph databases differ from traditional SQL DBs, when it makes sense to use a graph database, and what the advantages are. We’ll also work through an example project to get a feel for some of the concepts, and sprinkle in a littler Docker goodness for some added fun.

General Medium (1 hour)

I once, to my colleague’s chagrin, thought through a tech talk during a drive, wrote slides in an hour, and gave a presentation that was well received and lasted exactly as long as it was scheduled. After doing this a few times (for better and worse), I’ve picked up some tips along the way on how to deliver a talk no matter how rushed or pressured you may feel. We’ll discuss some of my tips, as well as how to know when you’re in over your head & adjust.

General Medium (1 hour)

Have you ever been stuck at a whiteboard or solving a brainteaser and thought “there must be a better way”? Good news: there very much is. Technical interviews can be a nightmare for both the interviewer and interviewee. In this talk, Sean walks through his philosophy & practical tips for running technical interviews that are primed for success.

General Medium (1 hour)

A presentation on the “why” of OSS software with an introduction on how to contribute. Also, pictures of puppies. :) Aimed at those who are considering stepping into OSS for the first time but aren't sure where to begin or how they'll be perceived.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

You can do *anything* with JavaScript, from web applications to artificial intelligence. That said, not all of us love working in a weakly-typed dynamic language. Fable is a free and open-source tool that can solve not only these pains but further fulfill the desire to write full-stack web and mobile applications in a single language while sharing code across platforms. In this session, be prepared for a head-first overview of F#, how to compile it to JavaScript, and learn about how real businesses use F# to create full-stack mobile and web applications powered by Fable. You'll walk away with concrete next steps any road of success Fable can lead you on.

General 0

Everything is connected, from our microscopic brain neurons to the grandiose universe wherein all bodies of mass are pulled towards each other in a graph of gravitation. In a fashion as structured as graphs themselves, we'll use my deep love for graphs as a catalyst for the exploration, understanding, and usage of these highly-useful structures. We'll start off with an introduction to what graphs are, how we can work with them, and what 'graph theory' is. From there, we'll delve into usage within programming languages of several paradigms, including JavaScript, F#, and C#. Finally, we'll look at graphs as an effective way to store real business data and the benefits that this path lends itself to.

General 0

In this session we take a small, functional but tightly-coupled, software solution and improve its design using each of Robert C. Martin's S.O.L.I.D. principles. Each principle is applied in sequence to the existing solution, making it possible for the attendee to observe the principle in relative isolation first while also evolving an understanding of how the principles all collaboratively reinforce each other when applied together. Before each principle is applied and the solution is refactored to introduce it, the attendee is presented with one or two simple PowerPoint slides to introduce the concept and provide some abstract understanding of its goals and benefits to OO programming. The principle is then applied to the existing solution, demonstrating the practical application of the principle to working software. At each step along the way, the existing solution (a simple console application) is re-executed, demonstrating that the overall behavior of the software solution has not been negatively impacted by the various refactorings.

General 0

To believe the hype today, “Chatbots are the new mobile app” (if you don’t have one, you’re probably some sort of throwback to a bygone age). We’ve all been told that the confluence of the explosion of the number of chat messaging platforms, the increasing amount of attention users give to messaging experiences (at the expense of other experiences), huge improvements in NLP (Natural Language Processing), and the increased efficacy of Artificial Intelligence are all combining to make chatbots “the next frontier in user engagement”. And yet, if all that is true, why is Facebook pulling back on its promotion of Facebook Messenger Chatbots as their own data shows up to 70% of current Facebook chatbots are considered a “failure” by Facebook users? In this talk, we’ll try to separate the hype from reality about the current (and future) state of chatbots. Through this process, we’ll identify a series of important design considerations that can form the foundation of any successful chatbot project and explore the patterns and techniques that can help you develop a truly useful conversational experience for your users. Using node.js, the Microsoft Bot Framework, and Microsoft Cognitive Services as an example platform, we’ll explore a detailed implementation built using all the principles that can help make your chatbot successful.

General 0

In all its previous hype-cycles, Artificial Intelligence (AI) repeatedly fell far short of its promises. Computers were underpowered and consuming AI was too complicated, leaving its benefits unapproachable to all but a small group of experts. But now advances in Machine Learning coupled with the scale of the Azure Cloud bring us Microsoft Cognitive Services, a collection of purpose-built capabilities based on AI and Machine Learning that make it possible for developers of all backgrounds to easily enrich their own projects with these powerful capabilities. In this talk we’ll explore the universe of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services and understand how to use them in your own software projects. We’ll explore services for Facial Recognition, object detection, Natural Language Processing (NLP), as well as Topic Extraction and Sentiment Analysis. We’ll apply these services to various media types from still images to video to text to discover how easy it can be to bring the power of AI and Machine Learning into your own software systems.

General 0

As more and more data and systems grow larger and more complex, designing massively-concurrent systems becomes both more and more challenging and more and more common a problem facing developers. In this talk, we'll explore Azure Service Fabric -- the same platform Microsoft uses to run services like Skype for Business, Intune, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Data Factory, Azure DocumentDB, Azure SQL Database, and Cortana -- now also available to the broader development community to power your own solutions both on-premises and with any cloud provider you prefer (Azure, AWS, or otherwise). Along the way, we'll explore both micro-services architectures and Actor programming models, and discover how they can greatly simplify both the development of massively-parallel systems and our ability to reason about them as developers. We'll also understand how Azure Service Fabric (and other micro-services-inspired frameworks) might still have a role to play in your solutions even if you're not actively building the next multi-petabyte parallel processing system in your basement.

General 0

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone with any real-world software development experience that Object-Oriented inheritance modeling can’t cleanly solve every class of problem we face as software engineers. AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming) provides us with an alternative perspective on our objects and their behaviors that can be leveraged to powerfully and flexibly solve whole classes of recurring software engineering challenges that OO systems routinely face. In this talk we will both illuminate the fundamental principles and patterns of AOP as well as demystify the different available techniques for adding AOP to the design of OO systems in .NET. We’ll explore techniques like compile-time and load-time IL-Weaving, Static and Dynamic Proxying, and others. We’ll also examine several tools and frameworks (both Open-Source/free and commercial options) that make it easier for the .NET developer to add AOP techniques to their toolbox for their everyday work.

General 0

You’re Agile. You write User Stories. Now what? The next step is often to turn those User Stories into executable tests that can help you validate the proper behavior of your complex software systems. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is the engine that can help to drive this process on your project. The logical evolution of the often too fine-grained process of Test-Driven Development, BDD not only represents a somewhat different technical practice but, more importantly, it also suggests an entirely different way of thinking about your system and the way in which you test it. In this session we will begin with a series of simple User Stories and demonstrate how the BDD process supports our codifying these User Stories into a series of “executable specifications” that can be used to validate the proper functionality of our complex software system. We will work at first without any of the complex overhead of so-called ‘BDD Frameworks’ to demonstrate the important concepts of BDD and then move on to investigate how and why one might look to use various ‘BDD Frameworks’ to offload some of the repetitive work often involved in the BDD process. Attendees should expect to leave with a good understanding of both the conceptual process that is Behavior-Driven Development as well as some of the technical practices that can help support its successful adoption.

Internet of Things 0

The browser’s capibilities have snuck up on us over the years, and it’s turned into a full blown operating system! "But wait," I hear you protest, "it’s not like the browser can talk to stuff I have plugged in to my USB ports!". Ah! But it can! The new WebUSB spec has arrived, and is already supported in at least one browser today. The previous hacks of connecting browsers to robots and other hardware will soon be a thing of the past. WebUSB as a first class API citizen opens up some great opportunities to create new and delightful experiences with robotics. I’ll introduce you to the WebUSB API, its history, and compare it to previous ’hacks’ to demonstrate why this is such a big deal for you, as a web developer. There will be real hardware shown on stage ready to inspire you to think outside of the box of what browsers are really meant to be used for.

DevOps / SDLC 0

Visual Studio Team Services is more than just a free private git repository. In this session we will see how easy it is to take existing code and have it built, tested, and deployed using VSTS. We will set up multiple builds, create gated check-ins, develop a deployment and testing progression, and more. Along the way we will cover different deployment scenarios, best practices, and tips to make your deployment process a lot easier.

General 0

Can you explain what all five principles in SOLID do? The purpose behind SOLID was to help us write loosely-coupled, extendable, predictable applications that were easier to test and easier to upgrade over time. Does that describe the applications you work on? If not, this session is for you. We will take a practical look at the SOLID principles and see how we can apply them to new and existing applications to make them better over time.

ASP.NET / .NET Core 0

How do you transition your existing web applications over to .NET Core? That is what a lot of developers are asking. Microsoft is pushing everyone to .NET Core but if you are still heavily invested in WebForms or MVC, what do you do? In this session we will lay out a roadmap of how to move towards .NET Core at a reasonable pace. You will walk away with a better understanding of the .NET web landscape as well as practical steps you can take to protect the future of your web application.

Client-Side Web Dev (JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.) 0

A peek into the future of web development, what the heck is Web Assembly and why should developers care!. With the introduction of Microsoft experimental web UI framework Blazor its now possible to harness your C#/.Net Skills to build full blown Web Assembly applications. Come learn and discuss the future of web development.

General 0

No one questions that data is vital to your company or organization. The future wellbeing of your business could depend on the clues hidden inside the vast data stores in your data center. Some days, looking at the data opens your eyes to possibilities, yet another day the data is opaque and hard to parse. Often the only difference between these two results is the way the information is visualized and presented to your eyes. Choosing the correct visual representation of the data becomes vital. Do it wrong and the data is merely wrapped in pretty graphics; do it right and the information emerges in clear and meaningful patterns. This fast paced and entertaining session starts by looking at how your brain and optical system perceive data. Walt explores the overall visualization concepts that make data easier to grasp, and the best way to show data so that the information is clear and understandable.

General 0

Here’s a familiar scenario. To deal with non-stop email inflow, many of us create rules that manage our inbox. We’ve got rules that prioritize, categorize, forward, move and delete. But attempt to add even simple logic tests in the rules and you run into a wall. Taking the big tool approach, you can create an Outlook Addin and use the full power of C# to tackle the problem. But not every programming job or workflow needs a high-powered toolset like C# or Visual Studio. For quick one-offs and simple tasks, you can fall back to more basic tools. With the cloud-based Microsoft Flow, you can quickly and easily build custom automations from your desktop, laptop, or mobile device without needing to write a single line of code. And with PowerApps, you can quickly create a mobile friendly UI that taps into company data and your Flows. Behind the scenes is the Common Data service layer; an easy way to merge disparate data sources. Read the marketing claims, Microsoft states that PowerApps is a tool for end-users. However, for those of us who code, Microsoft Flow provides a quick way to create personalized automated workflows between applications. Don’t be too quick to judge, behind the scenes Flow is built on top of Azure Logic Apps. Flow has an impressive list of service providers: like SharePoint, Dynamics 365, Teams, Yammer, Dropbox, Outlook, OneDrive and MailChimp. This session shows how to get started with PowerApps and build interesting integrations with little or no code.