Eric Boyd
Founder & CEO, responsiveX, Azure & AI MVP, Microsoft RD
Chicago, Illinois, United States
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Eric D. Boyd is a highly experienced entrepreneur, public speaker, and author with nearly 30 years of experience in the technology industry. He is the founder and CEO of responsiveX, a Microsoft partner and digital innovation consultancy. Eric is a sought-after speaker and thought leader, delivering keynote speeches, breakout sessions, and participating in panel discussions at many industry events. He is a Microsoft Azure and AI MVP, a Regional Director, and has extensive experience helping organizations with system design and architecture, cloud-native development, and artificial intelligence. Eric is the co-author of "Step-by-Step Azure SQL Database" and has contributed to several other publications. He shares his expertise and insights through his blog, social media, podcast interviews, and educational videos. Eric is committed to giving back to the community and supporting the next generation of technology leaders.
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Your Platform Needs Package Management
Dependencies should be versioned, discoverable, and curated to reduce dependency sprawl. Building and managing packages should be part of your platform strategy.
Testing Copilot Studio Agents
Copilot Studio agents don’t fail like traditional software. A small change to knowledge, instructions, actions, or security settings can quietly shift behavior, and you won’t notice until a user hits the worst possible edge case in production.
This session provides a practical testing strategy for Copilot Studio agents, based on Microsoft guidance and real-world patterns. You’ll learn how to “shift left” and treat testing as a continuous process: validate core scenarios, test knowledge coverage, run performance testing, regression suites before every release, and perform adversarial testing to catch prompt tricks, ambiguous intent, and unsafe action paths. We’ll also explore test sets and agent evaluations in Copilot Studio. You’ll learn how to use evaluation methods to measure what matters and how to turn those results into an iteration loop.
Telemetry, Evaluation, and Continuous Improvement for Copilot Studio Agents
If you don't measure it, you can’t improve it. In this session, you’ll learn which signals actually matter for Copilot Studio agents and how to build a practical iteration loop using telemetry and analytics.
We’ll cover how to define success metrics, instrument and correlate agent conversations with downstream actions, and how to turn real transcripts into test sets.
Finally, you’ll learn how to run repeatable agent evaluations against those test sets to catch regressions, track quality over time, and ship improvements with confidence.
Spec-Driven APIs Accelerate Delivery
Learn how spec-first OpenAPI descriptions act as an executable contract that drives code, tests, docs, and gateways. Learn how automation (SDKs, mocks, policies, breaking-change detection) shifts quality left without slowing teams.
Securing AI Applications on Microsoft Foundry
AI solutions introduce new security, privacy, and governance challenges that traditional application security models were not designed to handle. Securing prompts, models, tools, data access, and agent behavior requires a fundamentally different approach.
In this session, you will learn how to secure AI applications and agents built on Microsoft Foundry across their entire lifecycle, from design and development to deployment and runtime operations. We will explore how to establish strong identity and access controls for agents and tools, securely connect AI systems to enterprise data, and apply least-privilege principles using managed identities, role-based access control, and policy enforcement.
You'll also learn how Microsoft Foundry enables enterprise-grade governance at scale, including content safety, grounding controls, auditability, traceability, and posture management. Through real-world architecture diagrams and practical scenarios, you will see how to prevent common AI security failures such as prompt injection, data exfiltration, over-privileged agents, and ungoverned model usage.
Phishing-Resistant MFA: Passkeys, FIDO2, and Windows Hello for Business with Entra ID
"MFA everywhere" isn’t enough anymore. Phishing kits, token theft, and MFA fatigue attacks keep evolving. This session is a hands-on, step-by-step guide to rolling out phishing-resistant authentication with Entra ID.
We’ll compare passkeys, FIDO2 security keys, and Windows Hello for Business, then implement an end-to-end rollout plan including pilot groups, device readiness, registration experiences, and how to enforce with authentication strengths and Conditional Access.
Orchestrating Multi-Agent Workflows with Microsoft Agent Framework
Microsoft Agent Framework is Microsoft’s new open-source SDK that unifies the strengths of Semantic Kernel and AutoGen into a single platform for building and orchestrating multi-agent systems.
In this session, you’ll learn how to orchestrate multi-agent workflows that go beyond ad-hoc agent conversations. We’ll explore two complementary models: agent-driven orchestration for adaptive collaboration and workflow-driven orchestration for deterministic, business-critical processes. You'll also see how to combine them effectively in real-world applications.
Through architecture diagrams and live demos, you’ll see how to coordinate specialized agents, route tasks, manage state across long-running executions, apply approval gates, and safely invoke tools and APIs. You’ll also learn how Agent Framework enables teams to move from experimental multi-agent prototypes to observable, scalable, and governable systems suitable for enterprise workloads.
Modern Authentication and Authorization with OIDC, OAuth2, and Resource-based Permissions
Are you confused and bogged down by all the identity standards and terminology like OAuth, OAuth2, OpenID, OpenId Connection, SAML, Federation and claims-based security?
Open web standards for authentication, authorization and delegation are very important in our connected, integrated and mobile world. There are demands from both corporate and consumer technology initiatives for single sign-on, integration with external partners, multi-tenancy, identity across application tiers, and authentication with multiple identity providers.
In this session, you will learn what the standards and terminology means, the standards and protocols to use in various scenarios, how to get started with IdentityServer, Azure Active Directory, and how to integrate modern identity standards into your applications, desktop, web, APIs and mobile.
Managing the lifecycle of Copilot Studio Agents
Learn how to apply real DevOps and ALM practices to Copilot Studio agents to improve release predictability.
We’ll compare Power Platform Pipelines for maker-friendly deployments and pro-dev CI/CD with Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions. And you'll see it in action, including source control, build validation, solution export/import, approvals, and rollback strategies.
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence using Python
Artificial intelligence is a machine’s ability to perform the cognitive functions we usually associate with human minds. There are many challenging problems that we face as developers of technology solutions that can be simplified using techniques and algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence.
Join Microsoft Azure MVP, Eric D. Boyd, for an immersive hands-on lab, a two-day expedition into the world of AI and ML with Python. As the language of choice for data science, advanced research, and the expanding field of AI, Python will propel you into the heart of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
During the one-day workshop, we will delve into the foundations of artificial intelligence spanning the topics of search algorithms, knowledge representation, uncertainty modeling, optimization strategies, machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing. This dynamic learning experience will be underpinned by the utilization of Python and established libraries such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, NLTK, and more.
Unlock the potential of AI using Python days in a hands-on environment where theory evolves into tangible skills, and where your career potential gains an invaluable edge.
During the workshop, we will not be introducing the Python language. You are expected to have prior knowledge of Python. But you do not need prior AI or ML experience.
Inside the Mind of a Game Hacker
Video games are some of the most heavily attacked software systems in existence. They combine real-time networking, virtual economies, identity, and competitive integrity, which makes them a perfect proving ground for modern cyber attacks. The same techniques used to create aimbots, infinite money glitches, and item duplication exploits are the same techniques used to break cloud APIs, SaaS platforms, and mobile apps.
Using a simple multiplayer game and its backend services, we’ll demonstrate how attackers:
- Manipulate client state
- Forge and replay network traffic
- Exploit race conditions
- Abuse predictable identifiers and naive economic rules
Each exploit is mapped directly to a real-world security failure (API abuse, business-logic flaws, and zero-trust violations), showing how “trusting the client” and weak server-side validation collapse as soon as an attacker starts observing and modifying runtime behavior.
You’ll leave with a practical threat model for any interactive system, and a new way to spot how ordinary features become an exploit playground under adversarial thinking.
I Stole Your Azure Tenant With a Login Link
How OAuth, B2B, and Microsoft Graph turn trust into an attack surface
Modern cloud breaches no longer begin with exploits or malware. They begin with a link.
In this live demo, we show how a typical Microsoft Entra and Azure environment can be compromised using nothing more than B2B guest access and a standard “Sign in with Microsoft” OAuth flow. One click is all it takes to create a persistent, API-level foothold inside a tenant, one that survives password resets, bypasses MFA, and quietly expands over time.
This is how modern empires fall. No malware. No zero-days. Just 1999-era trust bugs, cookies, redirects, and pop-ups that were never designed to guard trillion-dollar clouds.
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how these attacks actually happen today and what concrete controls and practical defenses stop them.
Hacking Your Web Apps and APIs
A Microsoft Developer’s Guide to Ethical Hacking
Web applications and web APIs are increasingly targeted by hackers and cybercriminals who exploit vulnerabilities and flaws to gain unauthorized access, steal data, or cause damage. In this session, you will delve into the art of ethical hacking to learn how to identify, exploit, and prevent some of the most common and dangerous attacks on your ASP.NET web apps and Web APIs, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, broken authentication, insecure deserialization, and more. Throughout the session, I’ll show you how you can improve your security posture and prevent attacks with secure development practices and by using capabilities built into ASP.NET and features available to you in Microsoft Azure.
Hack the Helper: Exploiting AI Agents, MCP, LLMs, and the new AppSec frontier
In the late 1990s, the web felt harmless. Forms, cookies, and JavaScript looked like toys. Then XSS, session hijacking, and SQL injection taught us that every input, identity, and dependency is an attack surface.
We are repeating that mistake with AI.
Modern AI systems are no longer chatbots. They are autonomous agents with memory, tools, API keys, vector databases, and access to internal systems. They can read files, call APIs, send messages, execute workflows, and make decisions on behalf of users and enterprises.
That makes them extremely valuable targets.
In this talk, we will treat AI systems the way hackers treat web applications. We will map classic attack techniques to their AI equivalents, including prompt injection, vector poisoning, tool hijacking, MCP supply-chain attacks, agent identity abuse, and data exfiltration through “helpful” AI workflows.
Using the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications and the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, we will show how untrusted prompts, untrusted embeddings, and untrusted tools combine into a perfect storm. A single malicious input can cause an AI agent to misuse its credentials, leak sensitive data, or execute unintended actions, all without malware, exploits, or shell access.
This session is not about broken models. It is about broken trust boundaries.
If you understand XSS, CSRF, dependency confusion, and token theft, you already understand how to hack AI. This talk shows how the same mistakes are being made again, only now the targets are autonomous systems running with enterprise-grade privileges.
Grounding, Memory, and Retrieval: Designing Agent Context That Does Not Collapse in Production
Most agent failures are context failures. This session examines how to design grounding and memory strategies that support enterprise reliability, including when to use short-term conversation context, durable memory, structured knowledge sources, and retrieval pipelines backed by Azure AI Services.
We will cover retrieval tradeoffs, freshness problems, tenant isolation, and how to prevent agents from pulling too much irrelevant context into the decision loop. Attendees will leave with practical patterns for building context systems that improve answer quality and task completion without turning every request into an expensive, opaque retrieval stack.
Getting started with Python
According to the TIOBE Index and the latest GitHub State of the Octoverse report, Python currently stands as the most popular programming language. Its remarkable trajectory over the past three decades can be attributed to its inherent simplicity, an expansive ecosystem of libraries and packages, and its remarkable versatility across a diverse array of domains including data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, IoT, robotics, and automated task execution.
Join Microsoft Azure and AI MVP, Eric D. Boyd, for an immersive hands-on workshop into the world of Python. During this one-day workshop, you'll learn a programming language with far-reaching applicability. As the language of choice for data science, advanced research, and the expanding field of AI, Python will propel you into the heart of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And you don’t need any prior knowledge of Python to attend.
We'll begin by getting our development environment set up for Python development with Visual Studio Code. Once everyone is up and running, we will spend the rest of the day exploring the Python language and writing Python code together. We will start exploring fundamental language constructs including variables, data types, functions, conditionals, loops, and guidelines for writing Python code according to the conventions established by the Python community.
Next, we will explore Python data structures for working with collections of data and learn how we can work with these data structures effectively and efficiently using powerful Python language features. We will also explore exceptions and how to handle errors in your Python programs.
From there, we'll explore how you can structure and reuse code with Python modules. We will explore what’s available in the built-in Python standard library, and we will explore the ecosystem of Python packages and libraries including popular libraries like NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib.
As a developer, one of the things you should do to create great software is test your code. In addition to exploring the troubleshooting and debugging capabilities of Visual Studio Code, we will explore how to create automated tests to test your Python code.
Before we conclude, we will explore how to use Python to create programs and apps beyond the terminal window. We will use notebooks for interactively working with Python. We will explore how you can consume Python from other languages like C# and how Python can integrate with your C# apps. And lastly, we will explore how to create web apps and web APIs with Python using Flask and FastAPI.
From Vibe Coding to Spec-Driven Development with Spec Kit
Spec-Driven Development flips AI coding from guesswork to building exactly what’s needed. Learn how Spec Kit turns clear specs into executable plans and applications, leading AI coding agents to ship value aligned with the business and customer.
Evaluating Agentic Systems: What to Measure Before You Trust the Output
Too many teams ship agent experiences with little more than anecdotal validation. This session focuses on how to evaluate enterprise agentic systems using task completion, groundedness, tool success, latency, cost, and safety-oriented measures instead of relying on vibe-based acceptance criteria.
I will show how to build repeatable evaluation datasets, compare prompt and tool changes, and instrument systems for ongoing regression detection. Attendees will leave with a clear view of how evaluation fits into delivery pipelines and why it must be treated as an engineering discipline, not an optional extra.
Documentation Sites as a Platform Surface: Starlight, Astro, and AI-Ready Engineering Docs
Most engineering teams don't struggle because they lack documentation. They struggle because the documentation they have is scattered, stale, hard to navigate, and disconnected from the actual platform capabilities developers are supposed to use. This session shows how documentation sites built with frameworks like Astro and Starlight can become a real platform surface with versioned, discoverable, deployable, and organized docs around the capabilities your teams actually need.
We will cover how to get started without creating a docs side quest, how to structure content so teams can find the right path quickly, and how to treat docs as part of platform engineering rather than an afterthought. The session also connects this to AI coding agents, which are only as useful as the sources of truth they can rely on. Better docs make it easier for people and agents to understand supported paths, constraints, templates, and workflows, which reduces tribal knowledge and keeps AI-assisted delivery aligned with reality.
Distributed Locks, Sagas, and Coordination with Cosmos DB
In distributed systems, "just put a lock around it" sounds reasonable until you add retries, multiple regions, and a job that can run twice. Under real load you get duplicate processing, stuck workflows, and race conditions that only appear when everything is slow and concurrent.
In this session I'll show you how to use Cosmos DB as a coordination mechanism for distributed workflows, from basic lock/lease and leader-style patterns to saga orchestration for long-running work. We’ll focus on the correctness tradeoffs teams run into in production including contention, hotspots, retries, and how consistency choices affect what your system can safely assume across regions.
Detecting Risky Entra Configuration Changes Before They Become Incidents
Most tenant incidents don’t start with a clever exploit; they start with a well‑meaning change that outlives its context. A "temporary" Conditional Access exclusion during an outage, an app that’s granted one extra Graph permission to unblock a team, or an Intune setting tweak for a single hardware model can quietly become permanent. Weeks later, nobody remembers the reason, and your tenant drifts into a riskier state.
In this session we’ll build a small, repeatable drift detection loop using PowerShell and Microsoft Graph that produces a reviewable diff. We’ll focus on a curated set of "things that bite you" in Entra ID including Conditional Access policies, named locations, authentication method policies, and app/service principal permission-related configuration. Then we'll work through a process to capture changes and ultimately generate a change report a human can review. The goal is to show how you can turn the "check your tenant every few months" chore into a lightweight governance habit that actually fits into your workflow.
Designing AI Agents and Agentic AI Solutions
While models and tools for building AI agents continue to evolve quickly, the long-term success of agentic solutions depends far more on sound design, architecture, and user experience than on any single framework or SDK.
In this session, you will learn how to design AI agents and agentic AI systems that are reliable, understandable, and usable in real-world enterprise environments. We will focus on the architectural and UX decisions that are most critical when building agents that reason, plan, and act on behalf of users.
The session will cover core agent design concepts such as defining agent responsibilities and boundaries, choosing between single-agent and multi-agent architectures, managing context and memory, and designing action and tool interfaces that are safe and predictable. You will explore patterns for orchestration, human-in-the-loop workflows, and failure handling, along with common anti-patterns that lead to brittle or untrustworthy agents.
Beyond architecture, the talk emphasizes agent user experience, how users interact with agents, how agents explain their reasoning and actions, and how to design conversational and non-conversational interfaces that build trust and clarity. Real-world enterprise scenarios will be used throughout to illustrate how these design choices affect maintainability, governance, and adoption.
Attendees will leave with a practical mental model and a set of design patterns they can apply immediately when architecting AI agents inside modern applications.
Deploying Azure with Bicep
Infrastructure as code delivers many benefits to developers, infrastructure engineers, and their organizations. Azure resource manager made it possible to define your Azure resources and infrastructure using Azure resource manager (ARM) templates, which was a great step forward. But these JSON-based ARM templates can be challenging to work with. The Bicep domain specific language was created to simplify the development and management of your Azure infrastructure as code, eliminating the need for wrangling JSON.
Join me for this session to learn how I’ve been using Bicep to automate complex Azure infrastructure deployments while simplifying the code to do so. I’ll provide an overview of the Bicep language, a lap around the tools you need to be productive with Bicep, and I’ll show you where to go to get started and learn more.
In addition to getting started with Bicep, I’ll also show you how my team and I reuse Bicep code, orchestrate infrastructure deployments with DevOps tooling and release management pipelines, and how we reverse engineer existing Azure resources into Bicep templates and migrate existing ARM templates into Bicep.
Create a reusable .NET Cosmos DB library for simple and fast data access
Cosmos DB doesn’t behave like a relational database, so why do so many apps treat it like one? The pattern usually starts innocently with a repository interface and a couple of helper methods to hide the database, then a year later you’re debugging cross-partition queries you didn’t mean to write and write paths that overwrite changes because concurrency was never part of the contract.
In this session we’ll design a reusable .NET data access library that abstracts Cosmos DB access while still leveraging its strengths and keeping the sharp edges visible. We’ll cover how to encapsulate queries without hiding performance costs, how to handle cross-partition queries intentionally, how to manage connections and client reuse, and how to map documents to domain models without losing control of serialization. We’ll also walk through the behaviors you hit in production including consistency choices, ETag-based concurrency, working with nested resources, and robust error handling.
This is aimed at teams building long-lived systems that need a maintainable, evolvable Cosmos DB data access layer, one that makes it easier to do the right thing by default, and harder to do the expensive thing accidentally.
Copilot Studio from Zero to Production
Copilot Studio makes it easy to build a chatbot. Shipping a Copilot or AI Agent that’s reliable, secure, and useful is a different game. In this session, we'll build an agent. We'll define scope, design conversation flows, connect to enterprise data, add actions, handle fallbacks, and validate the experience before launch.
Conversation Design and UX Patterns for AI Agents
Great AI agents are designed, not just configured. This session covers proven conversational UX patterns for AI agents. You'll leave with a toolkit of reusable conversation patterns you can incorporate into your agents.
Conditional Access Policies That Don’t Break Your Business
Conditional Access is where identity decisions turn into day-to-day reality. And it’s also where perfectly reasonable changes can lock out executives, break device rollout, or create a pile of "temporary" exclusions that never go away.
In this session we’ll build a small, production-ready Conditional Access policy set for a modern Microsoft 365 tenant. We’ll separate interactive users from admins, define an emergency access (break-glass) strategy, and apply strong authentication where it matters using authentication strengths. We’ll also cover the knobs that make policies behave predictably in real environments including device filters and compliant device requirements, location patterns (named locations and trusted networks), and how risk signals change the story.
You’ll leave with a rollout approach that avoids surprises. The goal isn’t more policies, it’s fewer policies that you can explain, audit, and operate.
Building AI at the Edge: Foundry Local, NPUs, and Copilot+ PCs
Cloud-hosted AI isn’t always the right answer. Privacy requirements, latency constraints, offline scenarios, and cost pressures are pushing more intelligence to the edge, directly onto user PCs and devices.
With Foundry Local, Copilot+ PCs, and NPU-accelerated models, Microsoft is enabling developers to build, test, and run AI workloads locally using the same models, prompts, and workflows they deploy to the cloud.
In this session, you’ll learn how to develop local-first AI applications that run directly on Copilot+ PCs using the on-device Neural Processing Unit (NPU). We’ll explore how Foundry Local bridges local development and cloud deployment, how NPUs change performance and power profiles, and how to design applications that seamlessly move between edge and Azure.
You’ll see practical demos running models locally, invoking them from .NET and Python, and deciding when AI should run on the device versus in the cloud, without rewriting your application.
Azure AI Services in Enterprise Architectures: Choosing the Right Capability for the Right Job
Enterprise teams do not need one AI service. They need a coherent platform strategy across search, speech, document intelligence, content safety, and model-hosted experiences. This session breaks down how Microsoft Foundry and Azure AI Services fit together in production architectures and how to avoid building accidental complexity around them.
We will compare common enterprise patterns, including document processing pipelines, knowledge retrieval, speech-enabled workflows, and governed generative experiences. Along the way, we will cover integration boundaries, security and compliance concerns, and practical guidance for composing Azure AI capabilities into systems that are supportable and cost-aware.
Automating Model Choice with Microsoft Foundry Model Router
Developers are increasingly burdened with deciding which model to use, when, and why. Hard-coding model choices quickly breaks down as cost, latency, availability, and quality requirements change across workloads.
Microsoft Foundry’s Model Router removes this complexity by automatically selecting the optimal model for each request based on real-time signals such as performance, cost, and latency. Instead of embedding decision logic into application code, teams can rely on Foundry to route requests intelligently, improving reliability, reducing operational overhead, and accelerating time to production.
In this lightning session, you’ll see how Model Router works, when to use it, and how it fits into modern enterprise AI architectures. Through a focused demo, we’ll show how a single application can dynamically route across multiple models, handle fallback scenarios, and evolve from a single-model prototype into a scalable, production-ready AI solution.
AI Coding Workshop: Tools, Agents, and Spec-Driven Delivery
Most teams are getting value from AI coding tools, but they’re also accumulating a new kind of chaos: oversized diffs, missing tests, invented APIs, and “it looked right in chat” decisions that don’t survive code review. The hard part isn’t getting code to appear on screen, it’s getting changes you can trust, explain, ship, and maintain.
In this hands-on workshop, we’ll build a practical workflow for using AI tools and AI coding agents as part of real software delivery. We’ll use GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, and other AI tools. We'll focus on the mechanics that make them reliable including prompts that encode constraints, context, instructions, and reusable agents and skills for common engineering tasks.
We’ll finish by shifting from vibe-coding to spec-driven delivery using Spec Kit write. We'll write a small spec, generate a plan, implement with tests, and run deliberate review loops to catch the failures models are good at hiding. You’ll leave with templates, guardrails, and a workflow you can apply to your own codebases without changing your stack.
Agentic AI for Developers: Building Real Systems with Microsoft Foundry Agent Service
Agentic AI is moving quickly from demo-driven novelty to a practical application architecture. In this session, I will show how to design and build real AI agents with Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, focusing on the pieces that matter in production including tool execution, memory, grounding, orchestration, approvals, and observability.
Rather than treating agents like fancy chatbots, we will model them as software systems with explicit responsibilities, secure tool access, and clear operational boundaries. Attendees will see how .NET services, enterprise APIs, and Azure-hosted components can be exposed to agents in a way that is useful, governable, and maintainable.
A Lap around Microsoft Azure SQL Database
Microsoft Azure provides many options for storing data. Microsoft Azure SQL Database is Azure’s relational database service. If you are familiar with SQL Server, SQL Database will be a natural extension of your knowledge and skills.
In this session, you will get introduced to Azure SQL Database and learn how to get started. We will explore how to migrate an existing on-premise SQL Server database to Azure SQL Database. We will then walkthrough how to manage and administer your Azure SQL Database servers and databases. We will take a look at how to connect and build applications using SQL Database.
Next, we will look at more advanced scenarios using capabilities like scaling, sharding, Elastic Pools, serverless, and hyperscale. Finally, we will explore some of the things you should consider when using Azure SQL Database including connection management, security, replication, backups, and monitoring.
Modern desktop virtualization with Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop
The way we deliver secure, managed desktops has evolved dramatically. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Windows 365 (W365) sit at the center of modern, zero-trust remote and hybrid work strategies. Whether you’re supporting frontline workers, contractors, developers, or a distributed workforce, the combination of Cloud PCs and flexible VDI has become a critical part of the enterprise stack.
In this session, you'll learn how organizations are deploying AVD and Windows 365 today using cloud-native identity, zero-trust networking, Intune-based management, and modern provisioning patterns. We’ll walk through current architectural models, updated identity and access controls, image strategies, application delivery options, security baselines, GPU-enabled workloads, cost optimization techniques, and real-world lessons learned from large-scale deployments. You’ll also see how to choose between AVD and Windows 365, or how to combine them.
Whether you're planning your first deployment or modernizing existing VDI, this session will give you the clarity and tactical guidance needed to deliver secure, performant, and cost-effective cloud desktops.
Modern Testing Strategies for .NET Developers
Modern software applications are distributed, data-driven, API-first, and cloud-native, making software testing more challenging and more important than ever. As software developers, we also want to boost our productivity by taking advantage of AI coding agents. To do this safely and effectively, a modern testing strategy is essential.
In this session, you’ll learn how to modernize your testing approach across the full stack including unit tests, integration tests, API tests, UI automation, performance testing, and even chaos engineering. We’ll explore the latest capabilities in .NET, Azure, and GitHub, including Testcontainers, Playwright, Azure Load Testing, and more. You’ll leave with practical techniques you can apply immediately to improve quality, accelerate releases, and build confidence in your applications.
Monitor your applications and infrastructure
Your users would love for you to know about and correct issues before they find them. Application Insights and Azure Monitor enable you to collect usage, error, and telemetry data from your applications that can be used to detect and diagnose issues, analyze how your users interact with your applications, determine where to invest development effort, and ultimately enable you to provide your users with a better experience. Azure Log Analytics provides further capabilities to monitor the health of your infrastructure, services, and get a single pane-of-glass for monitoring the overall health of your solutions.
Join this session to learn how to get deeper insights into the health and usage of your solutions using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Azure Log Analytics, and the built-in capabilities of .NET to deliver great user experiences.
Python for .NET Developers – Becoming a Multi-Sport Developer
Do you have what it takes to be a multi-sport developer?
If you're a .NET developer, you’ve likely encountered Python in data science, artificial intelligence (AI), DevOps, cybersecurity, and other development projects. If you don’t know Python, you should probably add learning it to your training regimen. Thanks to the rapid growth of data science, machine learning, and AI, Python is currently the most popular programming language. It’s the programming world’s version of a rising all-star - versatile, powerful, and dominant, where productivity and flexibility matter.
Like an athlete cross-training for a new event, learning a new language can be intimidating, especially if you don’t know where to begin. This session is designed to help .NET developers get productive in Python quickly, using tools you are already familiar with and connecting the dots between the two ecosystems and languages.
We'll explore key differences and similarities in syntax, structure, and types - then dive into examples that show how to:
• Translate common C# programming patterns to Python
• Work with popular libraries like pandas, requests, and more
• Develop in familiar environments like VS Code and explore Jupyter Notebooks
• Avoid common pitfalls when moving between languages
• And interact across your Python and .NET projects
Whether you’re building AI models, automating infrastructure, or exploring data pipelines, Python is an important skill for the modern developer. Think of this session as your training ground to become a well-rounded, multi-sport developer, ready to compete in any event the industry throws your way.
Rapidly Create Intelligent AI Agents with Copilot Studio
AI agents are no longer experimental; they are becoming core building blocks for enterprise automation, productivity, and user interaction. Copilot Studio is Microsoft’s low-code platform for building intelligent AI agents that can reason, act, and integrate securely across your organization.
In this session, you’ll learn how to use Copilot Studio to rapidly create enterprise-ready AI agents that go far beyond simple chatbots. We’ll explore how generative orchestration replaces rigid dialog trees, how to define agent behavior using topics, triggers, and actions, and how to ground responses in trusted enterprise data. You’ll see how to connect agents to real systems using APIs, Power Platform connectors, and Microsoft 365 integrations, enabling agents to take meaningful action on behalf of users.
We’ll also cover agent memory, multi-turn conversation design, and built-in governance capabilities—showing how Copilot Studio helps teams build, deploy, and manage AI agents that deliver real business value while meeting enterprise security and compliance requirements.
Scalable Data Engineering and Analysis with PySpark in Microsoft Fabric
In this session, you’ll discover how to use PySpark in Microsoft Fabric to build scalable, Python-based data transformation pipelines while staying within the familiar Microsoft analytics ecosystem. You'll learn how PySpark integrates with OneLake and Fabric Lakehouses, and how to use notebooks to clean, transform, join, and enrich data from multiple sources. We’ll also explore how to leverage Spark SQL and the Pandas API on Spark to work efficiently with large datasets, and how to write your results back to the Lakehouse for use with tools like Power BI.
This session is ideal for data engineers and analysts ready to expand beyond traditional SQL workflows and tap into the full power of Python in Microsoft Fabric. No Spark experience is needed, just a curiosity to scale your data skills.
Securing Your Software Supply Chain
Software isn’t built from scratch, it’s assembled from open-source libraries, tools, build systems, CI/CD pipelines, cloud services, and container images. That makes your software supply chain one of the biggest attack surfaces in your organization. From dependency confusion and malicious npm, NuGet, and pip packages to insecure GitHub Actions and tampered build artifacts, attackers are increasingly targeting the components that developers rely on every day.
In this session, you’ll learn how to secure your supply chain end-to-end using proven tools and practices across GitHub, Azure, and the open-source ecosystem. We’ll dive into GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS), OWASP Dependency-Check, SBOM generation, package signing, secure workflows, artifact provenance, and SLSA-compliant pipelines. You’ll see how to detect vulnerabilities early, lock down your CI/CD pipeline, enforce safe dependency usage, and generate trusted artifacts that your organization and your customers can rely on.
If you build software, this session will show you exactly how to protect your code, your builds, your packages, and your supply chain.
Vector Search to GraphRAG: Modern Retrieval Patterns for Enterprise AI
As enterprises adopt AI copilots, agents, and knowledge-driven applications, retrieval is becoming the backbone of accuracy, trust, and real-world usefulness. Modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) now goes far beyond “chat over documents”, it blends vector search, hybrid search, graph-based reasoning, contextual compression, tool-using agents, and enterprise knowledge bases.
In this session, Eric D. Boyd guides you through the next generation of retrieval techniques and shows how to build them with Azure AI Search, Microsoft Foundry, and Foundry IQ. You’ll learn how embeddings work, how to design high-quality indexes, how to implement advanced ranking and context engineering strategies, and how to use GraphRAG and agentic retrieval to deliver domain-specialized copilots and intelligent agents. With .NET-focused examples and real-world patterns, you'll walk away knowing how to build retrieval systems that are accurate, scalable, and enterprise-ready.
Modern Authentication and Authorization with OIDC, OAuth2, and Fine-grained Permissions
Open web standards for authentication, authorization and delegation are especially important in our connected, integrated, and mobile world. There are expectations for single sign-on, integration with external partners, multi-tenancy, identity across application tiers, and authentication with multiple identity providers.
In this session, you will learn about the OpenId Connect (OIDC) and OAuth2 standards. You'll learn how to get started with Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Active Directory B2C, and Duende IdentityServer. You'll learn how to integrate modern identity protocols into your applications and APIs. And you'll also learn how to implement resource-based and fine-grained permissions in your applications.
Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code
Are you curious about Jupyter notebooks?
In this fast-paced session, you'll learn how to get up and running with Jupyter notebooks right inside Visual Studio Code. We’ll walk through installing the right extensions, opening and running notebooks, and using key features like interactive plots, variable explorers, and inline debugging.
Whether you're exploring data, prototyping models, or learning Python, this session will give you everything you need to start using Jupyter in VS Code.
Lakehouses, Warehouses, and OneLake Explained: Architecting with Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric brings together multiple analytical engines, including the Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, KQL Database, and Real-Time Intelligence, on top of a unified OneLake architecture. But with all these options, how do you choose the right one for your solution?
In this session, we’ll break down the architectural foundations of Fabric and demystify when to use each compute experience. You’ll learn how Delta Lake, shortcuts, dataflows, and medallion architecture influence your design choices; how OneLake enforces a unified, open, and governed storage layer; and how to build end-to-end workloads that flow from ingestion to transformation to semantic modeling in Power BI.
Whether you're modernizing an enterprise data platform, moving from Synapse or Azure Databricks, or designing greenfield analytics, this session will give you the clarity you need to make smart architectural decisions. You’ll leave with actionable patterns for ingestion, transformation, and semantic modeling, and real-world guidance to pick the right Fabric experience based on performance, cost, scalability, governance, and integration needs.
Mastering the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework
The Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) provides the proven guidance, architecture patterns, and implementation tools that help organizations confidently adopt Microsoft Azure at enterprise scale. For IT pros and system engineers, governance, networking, identity, security, operations, automation, and cost management all have to come together in a consistent, repeatable, and compliant environment.
In this session, you’ll learn how to design, deploy, and operate Azure enterprise landing zones (ALZ) using the CAF architecture, patterns, and tooling. We’ll walk through the core components of landing zones including management groups, identity and access strategy, network topology (hub-and-spoke and mesh), policy-driven governance, security baselines, automation with Infrastructure-as-Code, and operational practices for monitoring, backup, resilience, and lifecycle management.
You’ll also discover how tools like Azure Landing Zone Accelerator, Infrastructure-as-Code (Bicep/Terraform), Platform Automation & DevOps, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud fit into the broader enterprise platform. Through real-world examples and patterns from customer deployments, you’ll learn how to build a secure, scalable, compliant foundation that supports cloud workloads from initial migration to modernization and AI-driven innovation.
Whether you're planning your first enterprise landing zone or looking to enhance an existing platform, this session will give you the architectural clarity and practical guidance to accelerate secure cloud adoption with confidence.
Harnessing the Power of Asynchronous Messaging and Eventing for Distributed Systems at Scale
Distributed applications, microservices solutions and systems at scale depend on In today's era of distributed applications, microservices, and systems at scale, the key to achieving agility, resilience, and scalability lies in mastering the art of asynchronous messaging and eventing.
In this session I will delve deep into the world of asynchronous messaging and event-driven architectures. We will explore messaging design patterns such as competing consumers, pub/sub, event sourcing, command query responsibility segregation (CQRS), and more. You will gain an understanding of how these patterns can improve your system design and development. We will explore the benefits of decoupled, event-driven systems and how they contribute to fault tolerance, scalability, and adaptability in complex ecosystems.
I will demonstrate implementing the messaging and eventing patterns showing you how to put these concepts into practice using platforms like Azure Service Bus, Event Hubs, and Event Grid. You'll learn hands-on techniques for building robust, event-driven solutions that can handle the demands of modern, distributed applications.
Lastly, I will guide you through real-world use cases and practical insights, equipping you with the knowledge and tools to harness asynchronous messaging.
Whether you are an experienced developer looking to expand your skill set or an architect seeking to optimize your system's design, this session promises valuable insights and practical takeaways to help you create resilient, scalable, and responsive systems. messaging and eventing to achieve their goals.
Hacking & Securing ASP.NET Web Apps and Web APIs
Web applications and Web APIs remain the top target of attackers. .NET developers must know how their applications can be exploited in order to secure them effectively. In this fast-paced, demo-driven session, you'll step into the shoes of an ethical hacker to see how real vulnerabilities are found, exploited, and mitigated in ASP.NET Core and modern Web APIs.
We’ll walk through live demonstrations of attacks like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), CSRF, broken authentication, insecure deserialization, BOLA (Broken Object Level Authorization), and more,showing how simple mistakes can create serious risks. Then you'll learn how to harden your applications using built-in ASP.NET Core capabilities, secure coding patterns, minimal APIs, rate limiting, and modern authentication/authorization practices.
Finally, you’ll see how Microsoft Azure helps protect your applications with services such as API Management, Front Door, WAF, Key Vault, Defender for Cloud, and GitHub Advanced Security.
You'll leave with a practical, developer-focused playbook for protecting your web applications and APIs from today's most dangerous threats.
Enterprise AI with Microsoft Foundry: Building Intelligent, Production-Ready Apps
AI experimentation is easy. Enterprise AI is not. Real-world AI systems must be secure, governed, observable, testable, integrated with enterprise data, cost-efficient, and reliable at scale. In this session, Eric D. Boyd will show you how Microsoft Foundry helps developers navigate all 13 Considerations for Enterprise AI and turn powerful models into production-grade solutions.
You’ll learn how to work with the Foundry model catalog, ground models with enterprise data, fine-tune models, build agents and integrate with tools like Microsoft Fabric using the Foundry Agent Service, integrate AI into .NET applications using the Foundry SDK, and apply responsible AI and governance patterns across your entire lifecycle. Through demos and real examples, you'll see what it takes to move from prototype to production, and how Microsoft Foundry simplifies the journey.
Enterprise AI for IT Pros: Architecting, Securing, and Operating AI at Scale
Artificial intelligence is no longer an experiment, it’s becoming a core part of enterprise infrastructure, operations, and security. As organizations accelerate their AI adoption, IT professionals are now at the center of deploying, governing, securing, and operationalizing AI systems across the enterprise.
In this session, you’ll get a practical, IT-focused deep dive into Enterprise AI with Azure and Microsoft Foundry. We’ll cut through the hype and focus on what IT Pros need to know to support, run, and safeguard AI in the real world. You’ll learn how to design enterprise-ready AI environments, integrate AI workloads securely into your existing infrastructure, enforce governance and compliance, and ensure observability, reliability, and cost control.
We’ll walk through the 13 Considerations for Enterprise AI, including identity, security, data protection, networking, compliance, monitoring, cost governance, model lifecycle management, MLOps, policy enforcement, operational readiness, and more. I'll show how Azure and Microsoft Foundry work across these critical domains. Expect demos, architecture guidance, and actionable patterns you can bring back to your organization immediately.
Whether your organization is building copilots, rolling out agentic AI, deploying RAG systems, or integrating AI models into business applications, this session will equip you with the knowledge to deploy AI securely, reliably, and at enterprise scale.
Enrich your apps and AI agents with keyword and vector search
Search is by far the most popular way for users to find things within your applications. And a great keyword and semantic search implementation provides a much better user experience than categorical drill downs and deep taxonomies.
To enhance your custom AI agents with your organization's intelligence, you likely need a vector database and vector search.
Azure AI Search makes it possible to implement robust keyword, semantic, and vector search within your applications and AI agents without building search infrastructure and developing a search engine.
In this session, you will learn how to get started with Azure AI Search. We will walk through setting up indexes and will populate our indexes with data. Lastly, we will integrate search into applications and AI assistants and take advantage of the power of Azure AI Search.
Eliminating Secret Sprawl with Azure Managed Identity & Azure Key Vault
Managing credentials across sprawling application configurations is one of the biggest security and operational challenges facing IT Pros today. Hard-coded passwords, shared keys, connection strings, certificates, and service principals create unnecessary attack surface, complicate audits, and make it nearly impossible to maintain strong security hygiene at scale.
In this session, you’ll learn how to eliminate secret sprawl by shifting to identity-driven, zero-trust access with Azure Managed Identity and Azure Key Vault. We’ll explore how to remove secrets entirely from application code and configuration, securely authenticate workloads without credentials, and centralize secrets, certificates, and keys with robust governance and rotation policies. You’ll walk through real-world patterns for Azure VMs, App Services, Functions, containers, and automation scenarios, along with common pitfalls, migration techniques, and operational best practices.
By the end, you’ll be equipped with the practical knowledge to modernize your organization’s approach to secrets, reduce risk, and simplify operations through secure-by-default Azure platform capabilities.
Elevate Your Career with Python and AI
According to the TIOBE Index, Python currently stands as the most popular programming language. It’s remarkable trajectory over the past three decades can be attributed to its inherent simplicity, an expansive ecosystem of libraries and packages, and its remarkable versatility across a diverse array of domains including data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, IoT, robotics, and automated task execution.
Embark on a two-day journey to learn a new programming language with far-reaching applicability. As the language of choice for data science, advanced research, and the expanding field of AI, Python will propel you into the heart of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Join Microsoft Azure MVP, Eric D. Boyd, for an immersive hands-on lab, a two-day expedition into the world of Python, AI, and ML. You don’t need to have any prior knowledge of Python or AI to attend. We'll begin with the bedrock principles of Python. And on day two, we will explore the foundations of artificial intelligence and machine learning through many types of problems, scenarios, and algorithms.
Day 1 – Getting Started with Python
On Day 1, we will begin by getting a modern Python development environment set up with Visual Studio Code. Once everyone is up and running, we’ll spend the rest of the day exploring the Python language and writing Python code together, focusing on the parts of Python that matter most for today’s software developers, data engineers, and AI developers.
We’ll start with the fundamentals, including variables, data types, functions, conditionals, loops, and error handling, then quickly move into Pythonic patterns and conventions established by the Python community that make your code readable, maintainable, and production-ready. Along the way, we’ll work with core data structures, comprehensions, and powerful language features like type hints, dataclasses, and modules so you can structure and reuse code effectively. You’ll also get a practical introduction to object-oriented design in Python, learning how to design and organize classes for real applications.
From there, we’ll explore what’s available in the built-in Python standard library and the broader ecosystem of Python packages and libraries that you’ll use in practice, including popular libraries like NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib. You’ll see how to manage dependencies and environments, use Notebooks for interactive exploration, and bring your Python skills into data and analytics workflows with platforms like Microsoft Fabric.
As a developer, one of the most important things you can do to create great software is test your code. In addition to exploring the troubleshooting and debugging capabilities of Visual Studio Code, we’ll introduce automated testing so you can gain confidence in your Python code from the start.
Closing out Day 1, we will bring it all together by building a small, AI‑ready Python service. We’ll create a web app using Flask and FastAPI that will show how the foundational Python skills you’ve learned can power applications and services that call modern AI and machine learning models.
Before we conclude, we'll also see how to leverage Python's strengths from the .NET ecosystem by calling Python code from C# applications using CSnakes.
Day 2 – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence using Python
To attend Day 2 of this lab, you must have either attended Day 1 of this workshop or have a strong working knowledge of Python with a functional Python development environment. There will not be any time spent on day 2 teaching Python fundamentals or setting up Python development environments.
Artificial intelligence is a machine’s ability to perform the cognitive functions we usually associate with human minds. And there are many challenging problems that we face as developers of technology solutions that can be simplified using techniques and algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence.
On Day 2, you will immediately get to employ your newfound knowledge of Python to craft innovative solutions across the pivotal domains of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Together, we will delve into the foundations of artificial intelligence, spanning the topics of search algorithms, knowledge representation, uncertainty modeling, optimization strategies, machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing. This dynamic learning experience will be underpinned by the utilization of established libraries such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, NLTK, and more.
We will also explore other platforms like Azure Machine Learning to create and deploy machine learning models and solutions, and how you can use your Python knowledge and skills with Azure Machine Learning.
And our journey won’t conclude there. You’ll get to embark on a journey through the emerging world of generative AI, large language models, and prompt engineering. We will explore LLMs and AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and more. We'll learn how to use LLMs with your private data, and how to navigate the world of prompt engineering using tools like LangChain, opening doors to novel applications and possibilities in language-driven AI systems. We'll also explore how to build Agentic LLM-orchestrated AI solutions that can autonomously perform tasks and make decisions.
Unlock the potential of Python and AI over the course of two days in a hands-on environment where theory evolves into tangible skills, and where your career potential gains an invaluable edge.
Developer’s Guide to Fabric Pipelines & Data Engineering Workflows
Microsoft Fabric is reshaping how organizations build modern analytics and AI platforms by unifying data engineering, data science, real-time analytics, and BI on a single SaaS foundation. But for developers and data engineers, the real power shows up in the pipelines and orchestration capabilities that move and transform data reliably at scale.
In this session, you’ll get a practical, developer-focused tour of building end-to-end data engineering workflows in Microsoft Fabric. We’ll walk through how to design, build, and operate pipelines using Data Factory experiences in Fabric, notebooks, dataflows, and Lakehouses/Warehouses. You’ll see how to connect to common sources, orchestrate ingestion and transformation, manage environments, and integrate Fabric with your existing .NET and Azure architectures.
We’ll also dig into best practices for CI/CD, parametric pipelines, monitoring and alerting, and how to design workflows that support analytics, AI, and real-time scenarios without creating another “accidental data swamp.” If you’re a developer or data engineer who wants to get beyond the marketing and actually ship reliable Fabric-based data solutions, this session is for you.
Designing & Developing Modern Web APIs with .NET 10, OpenAPI, and Azure
Modern applications rely on well-designed, secure, and scalable web APIs. However, being successful across the lifecycle of web API design to operations can be challenging and time-consuming.
In this session, you'll learn how to design, build, document, secure, deploy, and operate high-quality APIs using .NET 10, OpenAPI, and Azure's API platform. We'll explore API-first design principles, walk through the newest .NET 10 capabilities for Minimal APIs and controllers, and show how to integrate your APIs with Azure services like API Management, App Service, Entra ID, and Azure Monitor. You'll also see how to use OpenAPI to drive consistency, automate client generation, and enforce contracts across teams.
Whether you're modernizing legacy APIs or building new cloud-native microservices, you'll walk away with practical patterns, tooling insights, and demos to help you deliver robust, secure, and future-ready APIs.
Building MCP Servers with C# and .NET
AI agents are quickly becoming a first-class part of modern applications, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as the standard way to equip those agents with tools, data, and enterprise-grade capabilities. In this session, you’ll learn how to build MCP servers using C# and .NET, enabling your applications, copilots, and agentic workflows to interact with your business logic, APIs, and data in a secure and structured way.
We’ll walk through the fundamentals of MCP, how to implement tools and resources with .NET, and how to integrate your MCP server with developer experiences like VS Code, OpenAI clients, and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service. You’ll see end-to-end examples ranging from simple utilities to enterprise workflows that connect to SQL, Azure services, Microsoft Graph, and more.
Whether you’re building agent-powered applications or want to expose your .NET systems as reusable tools, this session will show you how to turn your .NET expertise into powerful AI integrations.
ASP.NET Web APIs from Design to Production
Streamline your API journey with OpenAPI, ASP.NET, Azure, and other practices and tools.
Web APIs are essential for building modern web applications that communicate with data and services. However, being successful across the lifecycle of web API design to operations can be challenging and time-consuming.
In this session, you will gain insights into the practices and tools that will help you be successful designing, developing, and operationalizing your Web APIs. We will begin with an introduction to OpenAPI and its role in API program success. You’ll see how to design your APIs using tools like Visual Studio Code utilizing the many free extensions that are available to you. We’ll also look at some commercial tools you might find helpful as you’re designing your APIs. We’ll discuss industry standards and best practices for Web API design and show you how you can validate your API definitions against the standards and rules you set for your organization.
You will learn how to prototype and mock your API. We’ll walk through some approaches to accelerating your development by generating ASP.NET Web API scaffolding and strongly typed API Clients from your OpenAPI definitions. We’ll also explore various testing techniques and consider ways to deploy your APIs to Azure.
Lastly, we’ll discuss managing and governing your APIs with the API Gateway pattern using Azure API Management and Azure Application Gateway. We’ll explore modern identity and security using OpenID Connect and OAuth2. And we’ll monitor the health and operations of our APIs using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Log Analytics. Join this session to learn how to use OpenAPI, ASP.NET, Azure, and a collection of tools that you should have in your toolbox to be successful with your API programs.
Agentic AI for Developers: Creating AI Agents with Microsoft Foundry Agent Service
Agentic AI is rapidly emerging as a powerful paradigm for building intelligent systems that can reason, plan, and act autonomously to achieve complex goals. With the new Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, Microsoft is enabling developers to create, deploy, and manage AI agents that can orchestrate tools, interact with users, and integrate deeply into enterprise workflows.
In this session, you’ll learn the foundations of agentic AI and how to bring them to life with Microsoft’s newest agent platform. You’ll explore agent architecture, capabilities, tools/actions, memory, multi-agent collaboration patterns, MCP integrations, grounding with enterprise data, and secure deployment inside Microsoft Azure. Real-world examples and live demos will show how agents can automate workflows, interact with APIs and .NET services, generate insights from enterprise data, and power new kinds of intelligent applications.
Predicting the Future using Azure Machine Learning
What if you could predict the future? How would that impact your business?
Predictive Analytics is a huge step towards making better and more informed business decisions and ultimately predicting future outcomes. As a society, the amount of data we are creating and storing is growing at an unprecedented rate. Making use of this historical data to predict future outcomes and identifying previously unknown relationships is what predictive analytics, data science, and machine learning is all about.
In this session, you will learn the fundamentals of predictive analytics, data science algorithms, and how to use Azure Machine Learning to identify associations and relationships in your data, and predict future outcomes. In addition, you will learn how you can expose this capability to other developers and integrate machine learning into your applications, without being a data scientist or machine learning expert.
Using API Gateways for flexibility and governance of your APIs
One of the challenges of microservices architectures is that clients need to connect to many services, with multiple endpoints, each possibly having different design and implementation characteristics.
The solution to this problem is a common microservices design patterns called API Gateway, which is simply a way to provide a single entry point for clients to connect, and the gateway will route and proxy requests to the appropriate services, do any needed transformation to create a unified experience for the clients.
You can write another application to be the API Gateway, or you could use existing services in Azure. Join this session to learn how to use API Management, Application Gateway and Azure Functions to create an API Gateway for your microservices.
Storage Strategies in Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure provides many options for data storage. Trying to make sense of all the options can be overwhelming. In this session, we will explore the Azure data services including SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Blob Storage, Files, and more. We will walk through the scenarios that each data service addresses, and we will dive into how to work with each of them. Lastly, we will explore the factors that encourage using one service over another when multiple fit into your solution and how they can complement each other when used together.
Securing Application Secrets with Azure Key Vault
As developers, we are constantly working with secrets and cryptographic keys, and often these secrets are handled with the appropriate caution and care. We have SSL/TLS certificates and their private keys laying around on file systems, connection strings and passwords in config files, and secrets in code. And this is not good.
Azure Key Vault is a cloud-based key management solution that can help and in this session we will walk through the capabilities of Azure Key Vault and explore how you protect and generate your secrets. You will learn how to get secrets out of your configuration files, applications and version control systems, rotate your keys automatically, and more.
Practical Internet of Things for the Microsoft Developer
Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot tech buzzword right now, and it ranges from wearables like the Fitbit to home automation like Nest and WeMo. But is this trend limited to a small set of companies and hobbyist hackers, or is it something broader and applicable to the masses?
In this session, Azure MVP Eric D. Boyd will give you a practical view of IoT starting by defining what IoT is, and the various components that are required and optional components that can enhance IoT solutions. We will then walk through how to get started creating IoT devices, sensors and clients with Windows.
While devices are fun to build and play with, the most interesting piece of IoT is the backend and the data. As a result, next we will create a backend for working with IoT data at mass scale using Azure’s IoT Suite, and using that data to build valuable analytics and insight.
Finally, Eric will present a framework for identifying and evaluating IoT opportunities in your organizations.
If you want to demystify IoT, cut through the hype, and get to practical scenarios and applications, you will not want to miss this session.
Developing Modern Web Apps with Azure
Modern web apps typically consist of web front-ends, web APIs and background jobs, and these all need to be secured with modern identity protocols. These modern web apps typically store data in multiple data platforms including relational databases like SQL Server, NoSql JSON document databases, and files. And we ultimately want to provide great experiences and solutions that our users love to use.
Microsoft Azure enables these modern web apps by providing lots of data centers around the world, a huge collection of services that enable robust capabilities in your web apps, and a developer-friendly environment that makes it easy for you to create, deploy and manage your web apps.
In this workshop, you will walk through building a modern web app using platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), serverless capabilities, containers, and microservices architectures in Azure. You will learn how to do background processing without needing to manage servers and virtual machines. And you will learn how to build and manage robust APIs. Throughout the development of the application, we will provision services and deploy in Azure, and you will learn to think about DevOps early on using tools like Azure DevOps and Azure Resource Management.
Next, we will enable modern identity in our application using OpenId Connect and OAuth 2.0 with Azure Active Directory. We will explore both the enterprise scenarios using AAD B2B, and we will also consider the consumer scenarios using AAD B2C. In addition to getting information about a user via security claims, you will learn how to interrogate the Azure Active Directory Graph API to get additional information. In addition to Azure Active Directory, we will explore alternatives like IdentityServer.
Then, we will integrate data into our application using various data services like Azure SQL Database, Storage and Cosmos DB.
Lastly, we will optimize user experience, performance and availability by using application-level caching, edge routing using Azure Traffic Manager, and edge caching using Azure CDN. And we will explore security and disaster recovery in Azure.
Before we conclude, we will also consider adding further capabilities including search and AI using services like Azure Search, Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Service.
Architecting and Developing Microservices Apps
Microservices are the next evolution of application architecture and service design. The design patterns and principles from Service-Oriented Architecture provided good guidance for service design, and now Microservices enhances SOA with architectures and platforms for operationalizing services through platforms like Azure Functions, Azure App Service, and Containers and Kubernetes with messaging platforms like Service Bus and EventHubs.
In this session, you will get a lap around Microservices. We will begin with a quick refresh on the design patterns that guide well-designed microservices architectures. We will then take an example monolithic application and break it down into a microservices architecture. Next, we will explore the benefits of platforms like Azure Functions, Azure App Services and Containers with Azure Kubernetes Service. Lastly, we will walk through building and running microservices using these tools and platforms.
Lock the Doors, Secure the Valuables, and Set the Alarm
Data center attacks and security breaches are hot, but common news today. When considering the cloud, security, privacy, and compliance are often top concerns. And rightfully so, you don’t want to be the next big news story.
Join Azure MVP, Eric D. Boyd, and learn how to secure your Azure Data Center by reducing the exposure for attacks, locking down internal and external communications, protecting your data, and monitoring the activities within your Azure environment.
You will get a lap around a number of Azure capabilities including network security groups, Key Vault, VM disk encryption, SQL Database security, Azure Security Center, Next-Generation Firewalls, Web Application Firewalls, and more.
Messaging Patterns for Distributed and Scalable Applications
Distributed applications, microservices solutions and systems at scale depend on asynchronous messaging and eventing to achieve their goals.
In this session, you will learn how to effectively utilize messaging and eventing solutions with common complex event processing patterns like event sourcing, CQRS, and more.
You'll also learn how to develop solutions implementing these patterns using platforms like Service Bus and Event Hubs.
Go Serverless with Azure Functions
Idle CPU cycles are wasteful, but it’s very likely that you have far more computing capacity than you use.
However, serverless compute architectures have arrived to save us from that waste. Serverless is a shift in how we think about provisioning compute resources and paying for these resources from cloud providers. Instead of deploying resources and underutilizing them, you truly pay for consumption and the compute cycles you use.
Join Azure MVP, Eric D. Boyd to learn how Microsoft is enabling serverless compute in Azure with Azure Functions. In this session, you will learn what serverless architectures and Azure Functions are all about. You will get an overview of how to get started developing and running serverless code. And you will explore how to integrate with other services and trigger your code from events throughout Azure and even in data centers outside of Azure.
In addition to the fundamentals of developing and deploying serverless code in Azure Functions, you will learn about the tooling and DevOps capabilities that exist for working with Functions. And last, but not least, we will model the pricing together so you understand the billing model and what to expect when running Azure Functions and when to use Azure Functions over other platforms.
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