Brian McKeiver
Microsoft Azure MVP; Co-Owner at BizStream
Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States
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Brian McKeiver is Co-Owner at BizStream, digital agency in Allendale, MI. At BizStream he is a solution architect, visionary, dual Microsoft Azure MVP (Azure AI and Azure PaaS), Kentico MVP, and Kontent.ai MVP. He has over 23 years of experience leading his agency of more than 40 employees, about a hundred clients spread out across North America, and one heck of an interesting story of how it all started from a two-person team. In addition to his expertise in web development, cloud, integration, and digital marketing, Brian is active with the tech community via his blog at Mcbeev.com.
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Feature Flag Football with Azure App Configuration
Utilizing Feature Flags is a powerful technique for allowing developers to modify system behavior without changing any code. .Net Core recently introduced a new Feature Management Library that makes implementing feature flags a breeze. Ultimately, flags standardize feature management in your system.
Azure App Configuration is also a recent Azure offering for configuring a host of variables in your .Net Core application. It offers a central place to manage app settings, environment variables, config values, and secrets. The service also allows updating these configurations at runtime without needing to restart or redeploy an app service.
Imagine these two items being used in conjunction to create a solution where automation rules, deployment risk is reduced, and new features can be introduced into your application very rapidly, but more importantly, very safely. It would be like if the New England Patriots wanted to try out a new offense against the lowly Detroit Lions for one week, while not worrying about de-railing their annual trip to the Super Bowl.
Faster .NET on Azure App Service: The Hard Lessons I Paid For
Azure App Service remains the best platform for deploying and scaling .NET applications. It's fully managed, loaded with features, and ready for production use without heavy lifting. But just because your app is running doesn't mean it's optimized.
In this session, we'll deploy a .NET 10 application to Azure App Service, establish a performance baseline, and then walk through real-world optimization techniques. You’ll learn how to configure App Service Plans (Windows vs Linux), fine-tune key settings, scale intelligently, and optimize where it makes sense. We'll also explore how to spot and solve performance issues using tools like Application Insights, Azure Metrics, and diagnostic logging.
In other words, you can easily learn from all the mistakes I've made over the years of seeing .NET applications crash and burn in Azure.
Agents That Do Things: Practical Agentic AI on Azure with .NET
Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Agent Framework represent the next evolution of AI development on Azure. It marks a major leap forward in how developers can design and orchestrate AI Agents and full agentic systems.
While Semantic Kernel gave us planners, memory, and connectors to bootstrap LLM-powered apps, the Agent Framework builds on those foundations to deliver a platform purpose-built for agent-based development.
By the end of the talk, you’ll understand how to create agentic solutions that not only think but act. Leave knowing how Microsoft Foundry brings the entire lifecycle together for discovery, configuration, deployment, and monitoring. This session will help you level up to true agentic design on Azure and .NET.
Blending Product Thinking with Software Modernization
In the world of software, products and systems don’t just remain static, they evolve, accumulate technical debt, and sometimes become an unmanageable mess of outdated frameworks, workarounds, and fragile dependencies.
When dealing with a 15-year-old platform, the question isn’t just how to modernize but what to modernize. Should you refactor piece by piece or completely rebuild? What about adding that new feature for the Product Owner. The answer isn’t always obvious.
This session explores how blending product thinking with software modernization leads to better outcomes. We’ll examine the lens of long-term product strategy, user needs, and business value. Using real-world lessons from a long-running SaaS product, a case study in modernizing a complex legacy platform, we’ll highlight how to balance technical constraints with customer expectations.
Whether you’re leading a legacy transformation or trying to avoid one in the future, this talk will showcase some smart modernization decisions that don’t make the business take a full stop.
Navigating Tools for Building AI Agents: A .NET Developer’s Guide
Curious about building your own AI-powered assistants and AI Agents, but not sure where to start? Join me for a deep dive into Microsoft's options for building AI services in your apps. We will review which approach in Azure AI Foundry, AI Agent Services, Semantic Kernel, Copilot Studio, and others, fits the best for various scenarios.
The talk aims to strip away complexities and simplify the learning curve of choosing the right tool for you. We’ll focus on practical demonstrations, including quickly deploying a model, building AI agents, and showing how options for code orchestration functions. We'll also explore integration with Azure OpenAI services, highlighting how these resources work together.
MACH based Website Development in Minutes
In today's digital landscape, MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) architecture is revolutionizing the way websites are developed and managed. The MACH mission is to encourage enterprises to switch from traditional single-vendor application suites to a more composable, best-of-breed architecture.
This session will guide you through the process of building scalable, composable, and highly customizable websites using MACH principles. We’ll use Azure to get it to the cloud, Github to automate deployments, and make it editable with a quick Headless CMS integration.
In the process, we will create a new website with a few simple elements that is also part of a larger organization (possibly news articles, blog posts, and/or featured content). All of this to happen with a serverless API-first approach, modern tech stack, and easy deployment path to the cloud.
Configurable cloud-native applications with .NET Aspire
Building apps for the cloud has always been hard. Developers are typically pulled away from writing their business logic and what matters most to deal with the complexity of the cloud.
To help simplify cloud app complexity, Microsoft has introduced .NET Aspire. It includes a curated set of components that make sense to use in your C# projects.
.NET Aspire makes it easy to discover, acquire, and configure essential dependencies for cloud-native apps from the very beginning of your project.
Join me to walk through the set-up and usage of this new, powerful tool that can make any .NET developer more efficient in delivering cloud-native applications.
Headless CMS Architecture Patterns
Using a Headless and API-First approach comes with a problem. With only an API (or multiple) to start with, how do you know you are building your project codebase ("head") to account for best practices such as caching, security, and best performance. How do you know what path offers to allow for the most flexibility with the least amount of headaches? It isn't the same as just having a database and template engine on the backend.
SaaS based Headless solutions are a powerful way to build modern enterprise class websites. They are also becoming more popular by the day.
Luckily, multiple solutions have now been built around these "API first" platforms. Some best practice architecture patterns have emerged as a result, and this session aims to share them. Attendees will see and learn these patterns for designing, building, and deploying Headless based solutions.
Leave the session with proven architecture patterns and how to apply them when working with a Headless CMS and API first stack.
State-of-the-art Search with Azure AI Search
We all know that providing a good search experience for website visitors is hard. Everyone expects it to “just” work like Bing or Google. Maybe there is a better way, maybe we fix this with help from AI.
Join the session to see how you can leverage Cognitive Services with Azure Cognitive Search in your apps. With AI based semantic search abilities, this technology can provide results that are closer to the intent of the original query. You will also learn how to enhance and enrich search through Cognitive Service Skills like natural language processing, image analysis, entity recognition capabilities.
Don't know what those are? Well that's not a problem because you will find out. You can expect to walk away knowing how to generate your own enrichment pipeline that leverages the power of AI to solve your search woes.
Why not use the same integrated Microsoft natural language stack that Bing and Office have used for more than a decade into your site? Maybe AI can make it "just" work.
How to Win Friends and Influence...Better Developer Estimates
Let's face it: creating estimates for tasks is not an exact science. Whether it's points, hours, level of effort, or whatever the next fad is, it mostly boils down to what feels like a shot in the dark.
I will review my "factors of a good estimate," a checklist of 15 lessons learned, tips, tricks, and strategies for creating accurate and timely estimates on your developer tasks. I'll also show you a unique estimating method that has worked for me, which you can take back to your own team.
I'm hopeful that sharing my experience of creating the majority of estimates at my company over the past 24 years will help you estimate more quickly and accurately.
At the end of the day, if you can create better estimates, maybe your project managers and team members will end up becoming long-time friends.
Unlocking AI with Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming the backbone for advanced AI ecosystems. The protocol enables context sharing, agent collaboration, and integration with large language models (LLMs). In this session, we’ll dive into what MCP is, why it’s gaining traction, and how it addresses the growing complexity of AI workflows. You’ll learn how MCP standardizes communication between AI agents and tools. Whether you’re building AI products, integrating models, or curious about the future of AI this session is for you.
CodeMash 2026 Sessionize Event
MI Dev Fest 25
Blending Product Thinking with Software Modernization
Momentum 2025 Sessionize Event
Beer City Code 2025 Sessionize Event
CloudCon.ai 2025
Unlocking AI with Model Context Protocol (MCP)
AAM Summit
Website Personalization: Deliver the Right Content at the Right Time.
Stir Trek 2025 Sessionize Event
MERGE 2025
Blending Product Thinking with Software Modernization
Midwest Collegiate Computing Conference 2025
How to Build your own AI agents Keynote
CodeMash 2025 Sessionize Event
Momentum 2024 Sessionize Event
dev up 2024 Sessionize Event
Beer City Code 2024 Sessionize Event
THAT Conf 2024
MACH based Website Development in Minutes
Nebraska.Code() 2024 Sessionize Event
International JavaScript Conference
Headless CMS Architecture Patterns
Stir Trek 2024 Sessionize Event
Michigan Technology Conference 2024 Sessionize Event
Digital Summit Dallas
Embracing AI Best Practices in CMS
Michigan DevFest 2023
State-of-the-art Search with Azure AI Search
Beer City Code 2023 Sessionize Event
KCDC 2023 Sessionize Event
SciFiDevConMayTheFourthEvent 2023 Sessionize Event
Kontent Horizons
Delivering on the Promise of AI
Microsoft Ignite 2022
State-of-the-art Search with Azure Cognitive Search
Atlanta Developers' Conference 2022 Sessionize Event
Beer City Code 2022 Sessionize Event
Nebraska.Code() 2022
Supercharged Static Sites in .NET with Statiq + Azure
dev up 2022 Sessionize Event
THAT Conference 2022
State-of-the-art Search with Azure Cognitive Search
Global Azure 2022 Sessionize Event
SciFiDevConMayTheFourthEvent Sessionize Event
Granite State Code Camp 2021 Sessionize Event
Code PaLOUsa 2021 Sessionize Event
Global Azure 2021 Sessionize Event
philly.NET Code Camp 2021 Sessionize Event
Code PaLOUsa 2020 Sessionize Event
philly.NET Code Camp 2020.1 Sessionize Event
Orlando Codecamp & Tech Conference 2020 Sessionize Event
Little Rock Tech Fest 2019 Sessionize Event
Code PaLOUsa 2019 Sessionize Event
Beer City Code 2019 Sessionize Event
philly.NET Code Camp 2019.1 Sessionize Event
Philly.Net Code Camp 2019.1
Let's Take a Tour of .NET Core: CLI,
THAT Conference 2019
How to Win Friends and Influence Better Developer Estimates
Prairie.Code() 2019
How to Win Friends and Influence Better Developer Estimates
Kentico Connection Denver
The Best of Both Worlds
Great Lakes Area .Net UG
Optimizing Azure App Services
Code PaLOUsa 2018
How to Build an E-commerce Chatbot
Little Rock Tech Fest
Build an Open Data .Net MVC site in 30 mins
Chicago .Net Users Group
Build an E-commerce Chatbot
Code on the Beach 2018
Build an E-commerce Chatbot (MS BotFramework)
CodeMash
Slaying the Headless CMS Jabberwocky,
Chicago Coder Conference
Search Bogging you Down? Move it to the Cloud
404 Conference
Good, Better, Best Website Performance Optimization
South Florida Code Camp
AMP up your Site with Accelerated Mobile Pages
GR Dev Day
Search Bogging You Down? Move it to the Cloud!
Kentico Partner Summit
To RFP or not to RFP
Kentico Connection Orlando
Growth Hacking with Kentico
Kentico Connection Brno
How To Wield Kentico 9 in the Real World
DogFoodCon 2015
Integrate & Automate Enterprise CMS Deployments
Kentico Connection Prague
Harness the Power of Marketing Automation
Kentico Connection Boston
- Upgrade like a Pro, Boston, MA
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