Building Intelligent Apps with Semantic Kernel and .NET

Semantic Kernel is a powerful tool that bridges the gap between conventional programming languages and cutting-0edge Large language Models (LLMs) empowering developers to explore AI integration within the .NET ecosystem, making it a valuable tool for building intelligent applications. This session will guide developers through the basics of integrating AI capabilities into their apps using Semantic Kernel. It’s specifically targeted at those who want to integrate AI effectively and understand the underlying concepts behind AI agents.

Building AI Agents with Semantic Kernel and C#

Semantic Kernel is a powerful tool that bridges the gap between conventional programming languages and cutting-edge Large language Models (LLMs) empowering developers to explore AI integration within the .NET ecosystem, making it a valuable tool for building intelligent applications. This session will guide developers through the basics of AI and the capabilities of Semantic Kernel. It’s specifically targeted at those who want to integrate AI effectively and understand the underlying concepts behind AI agents.

Accelerating Microservices Development with .NET Aspire and Dapr

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, agility and speed are essential for successful software development. This holds especially true when building microservices, where efficiency across the entire development lifecycle is crucial.

In this session, we look at .NET Aspire, an advanced framework designed to streamline microservices development. Through best practices, resilience, and scalability, it empowers developers to create efficient and cloud-native microservices.

We then look at Dapr and how the Dapr building blocks can be for common microservices patterns, such as state management, pub/sub, service invocation, and more.

While Dapr abstracts underlying cloud platforms, .NET Aspire enhances development by providing opinionated configuration without hiding the underlying technologies. Together, they empower developers to build resilient, scalable, and efficient microservices while maintaining compatibility with existing tools and ecosystems.

The real magic happens when we combine these technologies. Witness the synergy between .NET Aspire and Dapr through practical demos.

Join me on this exciting journey to unlock efficiency, speed, and innovation in microservices development!

Using Azure AI Search to always generate the most relevant results

In this session, we will take a deep dive into how the addition of vector search capabilities to former Azure Cognitve Search enables swift searches on extensive datasets in an enterprise-grade environment ensuring precision and flexibility. Additionally, the new Semantic Ranker leverages advanced language models to improve the relevance and quality of search results. We will see how vector search greatly improves the results but a hybrid retrieval and a reranking step delivers significantly better results - that will only make your app users get the most relevant information at their fingertips, always.

GraphQL - The API for modern apps and how to build GraphQL APIs in .NET

GraphQL is a new API standard that provides a more efficient, powerful and flexible alternative to REST. GraphQL enables declarative data fetching where a client can specify exactly what data it needs from an API. Instead of multiple endpoints that return fixed data structures, a GraphQL server only exposes a single endpoint and responds with precisely the data a client asked for. The single endpoint can forward the queries to downstream APIs, merge the data and return it to the client in a single response. This makes GraphQL a great solution in microservices architecture in which the number of endpoints for clients to render the page can become a rigid approach.

Build your own ChatGPT using Azure Open AI and .Net and interact with your own data

Generative AI has taken over the way we interact with data and also how we let our customers interact with data.
In this session, we will learn how we can create a Azure Open AI ChatBot using the Open AI Large Language Models that power ChatGPT and then add our own data to the mix which will then help us get the most relevant information to our customers. We will also see how we can hook up this chatbot to a .Net Application to bring this curated experience in our custom applications.

GitHub Copilot: The AI Pair programmer to boost dev productivity

AI tools that help developers are continuously emerging in the market. These CoPilots help developers accomplish tasks like generating code, tests and even simple applications very easily. But, at the end of the day, it is still an AI tool that can be wrong and sometimes repeatedly give you wrong answers.
As developers, we should be aware of the shortcomings so that we can use our coding knowledge to mitigate them. In this session, we will look at how we can make GitHub CoPilot a more useful tool in our development kit to substantially improve productivity.

Build a Kubernetes style modern app without complexities of Kubernetes using Azure Container Apps

Kubernetes can be complex. To get started with Kubernetes, developers must first go through an initial, steep learning curve before taking full advantage of all the features offered by Kubernetes. Although Microsoft offers Kubernetes as a fully managed service, you are still responsible for managing, configuring, and hardening the underlying Kubernetes cluster. Azure Container Apps abstracts this a step further and lets you focus on building applications using many of the benefits of Kubernetes without the need for cluster management – using the power of serverless.

In this session we will cover:
-What is Azure Container Apps
-How does it compare to Kubernetes
-Deploy a microservices application to Azure Container Apps
-Demos

Simplify building microservices with DAPR

Moving away from heavily coded monolithic applications to finer, self-contained microservices offers a vast array of benefits but at the same time they also introduce increased complexities in team and product management. To get started, the team must make decisions on picking the right dependencies in addition to the right solution.
It would be much easier to get started if there was a runtime that offered building blocks to implement some common patterns that you need to adopt in your application. This would allow teams to focus on building the right solution without need to choose the tools upfront. Dapr is that runtime.
Dapr or Distributed Application Runtime, is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

Making sense of all container options in Azure

With the hype around containerization, nearly every organization is trying to start their modernization journey with containers. If you are doing this on a cloud hyperscaler like Azure, your team already has many options to build and deploy cloud native and containerized applications. Should you always use Kubernetes? Or maybe a good old App Service is more suitable to run your website in a container? In this session, we cover which scenarios and use cases are best suited for the different container options available in Azure today.

GraphQL - The API for modern apps and how to build GraphQL APIs in .NET

GraphQL is a new API standard that provides a more efficient, powerful and flexible alternative to REST. GraphQL enables declarative data fetching where a client can specify exactly what data it needs from an API. Instead of multiple endpoints that return fixed data structures, a GraphQL server only exposes a single endpoint and responds with precisely the data a client asked for. The single endpoint can forward the queries to downstream APIs, merge the data and return it to the client in a single response. This makes GraphQL a great solution in microservices architecture in which the number of endpoints for clients to render the page can become a rigid approach.

In this session we will cover:
- What is GraphQL?
- What problem does it solve?
- GraphQL Schema, Operations, Types and Resolvers
- Build your own GraphQL Server with HotChocolate and .NET Core
- Schema stitching by joining multiple APIs to a single endpoint
-Demos

Designing for Sustainability on Azure

When designing for the cloud, the impact and benefits of a cloud hosted application have always been traditionally measured with financial and efficiency metrics. The Well Architected Framework for Azure has been no different.
Right now, organizations around the world are putting a renewed focus on sustainability and are trying to understand how cloud can help organizations reduce their carbon emissions and lessen their environmental footprint to help them achieve their sustainability and environmental goals.
In this session, we will look at how we can design solutions that maximize utilization but reduce waste while still using the Well-Architected Framework as a technical foundation.

Build your own ChatGPT using Azure Open AI and interact with it using .NET

Generative AI has taken over the way we interact with data and also how we let our customers interact with data.
In this session, we will learn how we can create a Azure Open AI ChatBot using the Open AI Large Language Models that power ChatGPT and then add our own data to the mix which will then help us get the most relevant information to our customers. We will also see how we can inject a custom tool to further enhance the experience. And all of this from a .NET application to bring this curated experience into our custom applications.