Confusion is the Sweat of Learning

When learning new skills, at some point, we're likely to find ourselves confused. That perplexion, the murky and unclear state of being out of sorts, can be daunting. The fear of never being able to understand can be hard to overcome, let alone eventually understanding the concept itself.

However, it is more important than you think to be confused.

Join me for this session where we'll discuss how confusion is an important part of the learning process. We'll cover how to identifying it, what steps to take when we're confused, and how the act of finding the answer can be more important than the answer itself.

Azure and Xamarin: Build the Mobile Apps of Tomorrow with Serverless, AI and Mobile

This hands-on workshop will take you from 0 to a fully working, cloud-connected, AI-powered mobile app.

We'll help you get setup with Visual Studio and the Xamarin tooling on either Windows or Mac, and connect your iPhone or your Android device ready to run an app.

Once you are set-up, we'll cover some basics of Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms, then it's on to setting up cloud services for storage, processing, and authentication.

The iOS and Android apps we build will combine accessing device hardware using Xamarin.Essentials, online AI services for face and emotion detection, and other services like authentication and blob storage, all built using a serverless architecture.

By the end of the workshop, you will have a production ready, AI and cloud-powered mobile app.

Introduction to Serverless with .NET + AWS Lambda

What is Serverless and how can AWS Lambda make your life better? Good question!
Join me for this session on Serverless where we'll answer all of the following questions:
- What is Serverless?
- How does it work?
- How can I scale my Serverless instance?
- Can I use Serverless like an API? How else can I trigger + run the code?
- And is it really cheaper? What's the catch?

The Pain and Success of Moving from Azure to AWS

In 2024, I ported my entire .NET cloud backend from Azure to AWS; databases, serverless apps, APIs, all of it. In this talk, I'll not only show you how you can do it yourself, but I'll also share the code and all of the lessons I've learned along the way!

As a long-time Azure user, I thought "How hard could it be?". It turns out that the workflows and toolsets for AWS are vastly different, and unfortunately, the docs aren't that great at helping us getting us there.

If you're seeking to embark on the same journey, come learn from my mistakes and gain the knowledge I wish I had before I spent months of my life learning AWS the hard way.

Creating Mobile Apps with .NET MAUI for iOS, Android, Windows and Mac

.NET MAUI is Microsoft's new framework for building cross-platform apps for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS, all using C#. Join me as we learn how to create our first .NET MAUI app.

As the lead developer for the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit, and a former Xamarin employee (.NET MAUI is the evolution of Xamarin), I know a thing or two about creating mobile apps in C#!

Join me as we discuss all of the tips + tricks to get started and do it yourself!

How to Maintain Popular Open Source Libraries Without Losing Your Mind

Working in open-source can be difficult. As the creator and maintainer of multiple open-source libraries that have hundreds of external collaborators and millions of downloads, I've learned a thing or two about what to do (and what not to do!) to maintain an open-source library without losing your mind.

In this session, I share with you the best practices I've learned for maintaining successful open source libraries:
- Branch Protection Rules
- Project Workflows
- Issue + Pull Request Templates
- Issue Reporting + Bug Reproductions
- New Feature suggestions
- CI / CD Best Practices
- Building a Sustainable Community

Read The Documentation? Nah - Let's use Generative AI Instead!

CodeWhisperer is plugin for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code and Jet Brains Rider that uses Generative AI to write our code for us!

Instead of spending our day pouring through documentation, we can instead describe to CodeWhisperer what we want, and let it show us how to implement it.

Join me for this session where we'll create new APIs, Mobile Apps and Web Apps without ever looking at the docs!

Using GraphQL with .NET MAUI

GraphQL is an exciting new API architecture that enables huge performance benefits over REST APIs. But why is it better than REST, and how do we interact with GraphQL APIs from our .NET MAUI apps?

Join me as we demonstrate how our mobile apps can benefit from GraphQL!

We’ll start by demonstrating the benefit of GraphQL: fewer API queries and smaller payloads.

We’ll then jump into a live-coding demo where we’ll learn how to consume GraphQL APIs in C#.

The .NET MAUI Community Toolkits: Three (3) Essential Libraries for Every .NET MAUI Developer

Three (3) Community Toolkits have revolutionized the way we create our .NET MAUI apps. They allow us to write more-concise, more-readable code, more quickly.

The MVVM Community Toolkit allows includes Source Generators that write all of the boilerplate MVVM code for you. The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit includes Converters, Behaviors, Custom Views like DrawingView + Popup + MediaElement; all of the essentials you need for your mobile apps. And the .NET MAUI Markup toolkit allows you to quickly + easily write your .NET MAUI UIs in C# (no XAML!).

As the creator of the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit, I am a bit biased, but I promise that you will use these libraries in all of your .NET MAUI apps going forward if you aren't already!

Join me in this session as we dive deep in the Community Toolkits to learn best practices and shine a spotlight on some of its best features!

Introduction to Serverless with AWS Lambda in C#

What is Serverless and how can AWS Lambda make your life better? Good question!

Join me for this session on Serverless where we'll cover
- What is Serverless?
- How does it work?
- How can I scale my Serverless instance?
- Can I use Serverless like an API? How else can I trigger + run the code?
- And is it really cheaper? What's the catch?

Choosing The Best AWS Service For Your Website + API

Have you ever been confused by the myriad of choices offered by AWS for hosting a website or an API?

Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail, Amplify, S3 (and more!) can each host websites + APIs. But which one should we choose?

Which one is cheapest? Which one is fastest? Which one will scale to meet our needs?

Join me in this session as we dive into each AWS hosting service to determine which one is best for your scenario and explain why!

Correcting Common Async/Await Mistakes in .NET 9

Did you know that the .NET compiler turns our async methods into a struct? And that .NET adds a try/catch block to each of these classes, potentially hiding thrown exceptions? It's true!

In this session, we will learn how to best use async/await in C# by analyzing how .NET compiles our async code.

Join me as we take an existing app and optimize its async code together, showing off performance gains, better exception handling, improved run-time speed, and smaller app size!

Consuming GraphQL using C#

GraphQL has become a staple technology in the JavaScript community, but it is still relatively new and unknown in the C# world.

Join me as we explore the GraphQL tools available for .NET developers, like HotChocolate + Strawberry Shake, and how these tools make it easy to consume GraphQL APIs in C#!

Choosing The Best Mobile Framework

Choosing a mobile app framework is overwhelming - there are dozens to evaluate. From native frameworks written in Swift, ObjC, Java, and Kotlin to cross-platform frameworks like React Native and Xamarin, it is difficult to understand the key differences between them.

Join me as we review the pros and cons of popular mobile app frameworks to determine which one is right for you!

Building .NET MAUI UIs in C#

Many developers use XAML to create UIs in .NET MAUI, but did you know that everything you can do in XAML can be done in C#?

Join me as we discuss the benefits of C# vs XAML, learn how to create our UIs in C# by exploring new exciting frameworks like C# Markup and MVU in .NET MAUI that make creating mobile apps even easier!

Building GraphQL APIs in C#

GraphQL is an exciting new API architecture that enables huge performance benefits over REST APIs.

But what is GraphQL? Why is it better than REST? And how do you create a GraphQL API in C#.

Join me as we learn all of this and more!
- Introduction to GraphQL
- Difference between REST & GraphQL
- C# libraries for building GraphQL APIs
- How to create a GraphQL API in C# using Hot Chocolate
- How AWS App Sync makes it easy to create GraphQL APIs in the cloud

Easily Add Artificial Intelligence To Your Apps Using Machine Learning as a Service

Machine Learning is hard, but MLaaS makes it cheap and easy to add artificial intelligence to your apps!

Companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have trained world-class models that allow us to implement AI with one line of code, making it easier than ever to implement Facial Recognition, Emotion Analysis, Optical Character Recognition and more!

Join me for a live-coding session to learn how to easily add Facial Recognition and Text Sentiment Analysis to your existing apps, and how we can leverage GenAI tools to write the code for us!

Mastering Web Applications with C# and AWS

In this immersive two-day workshop, we will dive into the realm of web application development on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using C#. Step-by-step, we will learn how to publish a website to the cloud, add a Serverless API, connect a database and secure it all using authentication + authorization.

- Create a Web Application with ASP.NET Core, publishing it to Elastic Beanstalk
- Implement Authentication with AWS Cognito and ASP.NET Core Identity
- Integrating a SQL Database with Amazon RDS and Entity Framework Core
- Creating Serverless APIs with AWS Lambda and API Gateway

Whether you're a seasoned .NET developer or just starting your journey, this workshop will equip you with the skills and knowledge to leverage the power of AWS for modern web application development using C#.

Requirements:
- Knowledge of C# Web Development in ASP.NET
- An AWS Account (we will provide free AWS credits)
- A working laptop with Visual Studio or Jet Brains installed