Marco De Sanctis

CTO at Mondra and Microsoft MVP

London, United Kingdom

My name is Marco and I have an incredible passion for technology which I had the privilege to turn into a job. I’ve been working with .NET since the first beta, focusing on ASP.NET and, more generally, anything that is web related. I’ve been an early adopter of Microsoft Azure – who remembers the portal in Silverlight? :) – and, since its introduction, Cloud technologies have represented the core of my professional interest.

Today I work in the beautiful London, where I’m playing my part in saving the planet being the CTO at Mondra. Getting involved in the .NET and Azure community is also a key aspect of my profession: I’m convinced that knowledge sharing is one of the best ways to improve our professional skills, and therefore I try to dedicate as much time as I can to activities such as writing articles or speaking at conferences and meetups. Thanks to that, I’ve been awarded as a Microsoft MVP for the last 13 years in a row.

Awards

Area of Expertise

Information & Communications Technology

Topics

Web
Cloud & DevOps
Azure
.NET Core ASP.NET Core ASP.NET .NET Azure DevOps VSTS Azure Visual Studio Scrum
.net core
ASP .NET Core
Cloud Architecture
.NET
.NET 8
AI
Big Data

Distilling claims based security in ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core brings, among the others, a completely revised security model, which has profound implications on how we deal with authentication, authorisation and resource management in our applications.

How do we support different identity providers? How do we implement a resource-based authorisation policy? How do we leverage multiple security protocols at the same time?

Diring this talk we'll do a deep dive into the ASP.NET Core security infrastructure, answering the above questions and many more

Creating a GraphQL API with ASP.NET Core

GraphQL is becoming more and more popular on the market as one of the most widely used communication standards for your service layer.

There are several advantages in adopting it over a classical RESTful API layer: flexibility is obviously the main one, but you also get advanced features such as notifications, caching and support to microservice architectures pretty much for free.

During this talk, we'll show some examples of how to leverage the peculiarities of GraphQL with an ASP.NET Core application, to build an interoperable service layer which works with different clients, like Blazor as well as React.js.

Build pure serverless applications with Blazor and Azure Functions

Blazor is Microsoft's implementation of the WebAssembly standard and it allows you to create rich and interactive client pages, which run entirely in the browser. And you can do it using C#, the Razor markup and the skills you already have gained from your experience with ASP.NET MVC. The integration with an API layer based in Azure Functions brings the technology even one step further, thanks to the capability of sharing code between client and server.

During this talk we'll see an example of how to build an eCommerce product list and cart, and deploy it into a purely serverless architecture in Azure, leveraging the new Static Web Apps service, Durable Entities and Serverless SQL Database

Bring your ASP.NET Core solutions to Kubernetes in Azure

Containers are one of the major breakthrough in IT of the past few years, and promise to revolutionise the way software is developed and deployed. Thanks to the support in Visual Studio 2019, time has never been more favourable to adopt them in our technological stack.

This talk will showcase a possible approach to port an existing ASP.NET Core solution to Docker, demonstrating how seamlessly Visual Studio integrates them in the development experience, while still embracing the advantages of dependency management that containers make possible.

After executing the solution locally on the development machine, we'll explore which options we have in order to deploy it on Azure Kubernetes Service. We'll show a possible example for a CI/CD pipeline in Azure DevOps and demonstrate how we can integrate it with the PaaS offering in Azure, such as Cosmos DB and Redis Cache.

Azure OpenAI for the ASP.NET Core developer

Very few advancements in technology have been so disruptive like Open AI's Chat GPT: thanks to its capability of handling unstructured data, and the ease of customization of its behaviour, we can now bring our applications to a level never seen before.

This talk presents a look at Azure OpenAI from the point of view of an application developer and show how we can leverage all its horsepower in our ASP.NET Core and Blazor solution to provide functionalities which were simply unthinkable just a few months ago.

During this talk we'll demonstrate some practical examples of how to do that: as a first step, we'll familiarise with the GPT's deployment model and completion API, and then shift our usage model from a simple chat to something closer to a programmable AI model. We'll show how, simply engineering the requests, we can bend its behaviour to accomplish a whole sort of different tasks, and how using functions will allow us to integrate it with the rest of services our application exposes.

As a last step, we'll then be tackling integration with our data. On one end, we'll learn how to use embeddings and vector search over our datasets, and what are the benefits of it. Then, we'll combine GPT models with Azure Synapse to perform data analysis over big data files.

Azure OpenAI for the ASP.NET Core developer

Azure Artifacts for your private NuGet packages: all you need to know to succeed

Azure Artifacts e' un servizio in Azure DevOps che ci permette di creare un feed privato per NuGet in pochi secondi.

Tuttavia, man mano che la complessita' delle nostre librerie aumenta, gestire i nostri pacchetti in maniera consistente diventa sempre piu' difficile. La chiave per non perdere il controllo della situazione si basa su tre aspetti fondamentali:
- essere in grado di gestire in maniera efficace il labirinto delle dipendenze tra i vari pacchetti
- adottare una versioning strategy appropriata
- implementare le opportune pipeline di CI/CD per distribuire il codice, supportando release e pre-release

Durante questo talk, mostreremo una potenziale soluzione che soddisfa questi tre requisiti, e che sarete immediatamente in grado di "portare a casa" e integrare con l'infrastruttura DevOps della vostra organizzazione

Azure Kubernetes Service beyond hello world: bring your container-based solution to production

Thanks to Azure Kubernetes Service, it only takes a few minutes to have your fully managed Kubernetes cluster up and running on Azure. You can quickly start experimenting with what is considered the de-facto standard to orchestrate containers solutions and understand how to leverage it and integrate it with the rest of the Azure ecosystem.

However, this is just a first step: going to production requires an in-depth look at several aspects which we have to take into account. How do I safely roll out an update after the initial deploy? How can I bring my custom domain, and expose my website in HTTPS? How do I ensure that my cluster stays healthy over time and how do I monitor it?

These are some of the topics we are going to explore during the talk, together with some useful best practices that will guide you when productionising your first container-based application.

Authentication and Authorization in Blazor

Thanks to Blazor, every .NET developer can now build Single Page Applications with a familiar syntax, sharing code with the server and leveraging C# instead of JavaScript.

However, the technical architecture is fundamentally different than the one of ASP.NET MVC or Razor Pages, especially when it comes to supporting modern security protocols, such as OpenID Connect and OAuth.

During this talk we'll revisit the basics of these modern security protocols and see what the templates in Visual Studio provide us out of the box.

Then we'll learn how to customize the security layer of our application, by integrating with an external identity provider such as Identity Server or Azure Active Directory, asking for user consent and retrieving the user claims after a successful login.

As a last step, we'll see how to reuse the token in order to make a secure call to an external API protected by OAuth.

Advanced testing scenarios for ASP.NET Core

Coded and automated tests are the key to software quality, however creating an isolated unit test, with all your mocked dependencies, isn't always the best option.

What if you need to test a complex Entity Framework query? or your authorisation logic? Sometimes writing tests that involve your dependencies is imperative to achieve the level of reliability that unit tests alone cannot guarantee.

During this talk we'll run through a journey in which, lead by examples, we'll learn when and how we can safely run reproducible integration tests with ASP.NET Core, we'll investigate alternative approaches such as BDD and we'll see how these concepts can all be automated within an Azure DevOps pipeline

ASP.NET Core loves Docker: from 0 to Azure in 75 minutes

When talking about containers, people usually think about them from the DevOps standpoint, but containers are going to revolutionise also the way we develop applications. During this talk, we'll port a non-trivial ASP.NET Core solution to Docker. After executing it locally on our machine, we'll explore which options we have to run it on the cloud and we'll deploy it to AKS (managed Kubernetes) in Azure.

Build single page applications with ASP.NET Core 3.0 and Blazor

Blazor is Microsoft's implementation of the WebAssembly standard and it allows you to create rich and interactive client pages, which run entirely in the browser. And you can do it using C#, the Razor markup and the skills you already have gained from your experience with ASP.NET MVC. The integration with an API layer based in ASP.NET Core brings the technology even one step further, thanks to the capability of sharing code between client and server.

This talk will cover what's availabile in Blazor today and provide you practical examples on how to create rich and interactive pages without writing a single Javascript line of code, and with a glimps on what's coming in the near future.

Blazor beyond File -> New Project: real world challenges and how to solve them

Blazor is here and promises to revolutionize the way we build Web Applications with the Microsoft Stack: for the first time, we can use C# and the Razor syntax to implement components that run natively in the browser sandbox, thanks to the Web Assembly standard.

However, as soon as we start building our first real application, we are prompted with some interesting challenges: how do we organize the UI code? can we really forget about the JavaScript world? how much logic can we share with the server side? How do we manage the state across multiple components?

This talk will answer all these questions and more, showing some practical tips you can re-use straight away in your new Blazor project.

Integrate containers and Kubernetes into your Azure DevOps build and release model

Docker has become a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2019 and porting your applications to containers is easier than ever. The advantages of this technology become really evident in Azure DevOps, when we can easily leverage the flexibility of containers in a number of areas.

This talk will showcase how Docker makes possible to build our code in Azure DevOps by using the most up-to-date SDKs, to create a fully working temporary environment to run our integration tests and to even use containers in order to run UI tests.

Then we will present a possible approach to distribute the images in Azure Container Registry, isolating development images from the production ones.

As a last step, we are going to explore how Azure Kubernetes Service fits into the loop, and how PaaS services in Azure can be created on the fly, integrated with our application in Kubernetes, and monitored altogether when live.

Docker per lo sviluppatore ASP.NET: dalle basi a Azure

I container rappresentano una vera e propria rivoluzione nel modo di implementare, testare e distribuire applicazioni e, come sviluppatori ASP.NET, probabilmente è il momento migliore per iniziare a sfruttare questa tecnologia.

In questo talk introdurremo le basi di Docker e dei container, poi sfrutteremo il tooling messo a disposizione da Visual Studio 2017 per portare un'applicazione ASP.NET Core esistente su container.

Infine, tramite VSTS, vedremo come configurare una pipeline di build e release automatizzate, per distribuirla su un cluster Kubernetes in Azure.