Modernizing your legacy application

How do you modernize beyond a 10-30 year legacy?

Too often, organizations rely on applications that have been around for 10+ years. These applications are maintained on an "as needed" basis and may represent a single point of failure, and those failures are expensive.

But how do you modernize over 10 years of legacy? Throw it all out and start over? That gets even more expensive. The answer is simple: it depends.

It depends on the specific needs of the business: does it need to scale? What about safety or privacy? How about Performance? Choices have to be made.

As an application modernization architect I have done my fair share of these projects. In this session I will share my experiences, and how I deal with them. By the end of the session you will have a clear understanding of where to start, and what steps to take to bring that business-critical application into the modern age.

.NET Aspire and Dapr: a microservices match made in heaven

Microservices are great but they bring their own challenges. The distributed application runtime, or Dapr, already solves quite some problems, but there is a new kid on the block. With. NET Aspire you get a neat dashboard, open telemetry tracing by default and much more.

Join me in this full day discovery of where Dapr and Aspire compliment each other, fight each other or when to choose which flavor.

By the end of this workshop you will have the tools you need to successfully setup a microservices architecture, and you'll know how to choose between Dapr or Aspire on its own, or how to use them together

Optimizing your HttpClient usage

HttpClient is a core class in .NET that developers frequently use, either directly or through proxy libraries. However, do you truly understand the full extent of this powerful tool? Did you know that different types of clients have distinct best practices when it comes to making HTTP calls?

In this deep-dive session, we will explore the best practices, advanced scenarios, and performance optimization techniques to ensure you get the most out of HttpClient in your applications. Beyond HttpClient, we will also discuss libraries that extend its capabilities, such as implementing the circuit breaker pattern.

By the end of this session, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of how HTTP calls work within .NET and how to achieve optimal performance in your applications.

User-Driven Transformation of Legacy Systems

Organizations worldwide continue to depend on software that’s more than a decade old—built on outdated platforms that no longer receive support. Although these legacy systems still run effectively, they are a security risk. But convincing stakeholders and financial decision makers to invest in something that they already have, and to convince end-users to move to a new system remains a formidable challenge.

How can we steer our customers toward a modern future? How do we transition business-critical applications to new technologies without sacrificing the features that users truly value? There is no simple answer to this question.

I’ve spent years navigating these modernization journeys, encountering many of the same challenges you face today. Over time, I’ve refined a way of working that not only allows me to grasp the details of how these legacy systems work but also helps me pinpoint the elements that matter most to end users. With these insights, I am well on my way to designing a new system that can get accepted by end-users and prove its worth.

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll simulate a real modernization scenario. I’ll take on multiple perspectives—from CFO to end user—and together we’ll craft several modern architectures for the use case at hand. We will end up with different architectures, because there is no “one size fits all”.

By the end of our interactive workshop, you’ll walk away with a new set of strategies and tools to convert old, reliable applications into innovative, efficient systems that not only meet today’s demands but also delight their users.

Workshop, can be 1 or 2 days

Smartening up your application with Microsoft Agent Framework

Intelligent, autonomous agent capabilities are rapidly becoming a foundational layer in modern applications.

Yet developers have long faced a fragmented ecosystem of experimental tooling on one side and enterprise‑grade frameworks on the other. The Microsoft Agent Framework solves this by unifying the innovation of AutoGen with the robustness of Semantic Kernel into a single open‑source SDK designed for building, deploying, and operating intelligent AI agents at scale.

In this session, I’ll show you how AI agents work, how they reason about goals, call tools and APIs and collaborate with other agents using the Microsoft Agent Framework.

We'll take that knowledge and apply it on building intelligent applications that are truly production‑ready, using built‑in observability, durability, and secure deployment options.

After this session you will be ready to start making your applications smarter with the Microsoft Agent Framework

Bending GitHub Copilot to Your Will

As developers, the hardest part of our job isn’t typing code, it’s the thinking, the design, the conceptual problem‑solving.

Coding agents can be a powerful partner in that process, but only when they work with your style rather than against it. Today, these agents can adapt far more than most developers realize. They can learn your coding patterns from context, follow your style guides, and even be directed through custom instruction files that shape how they behave.

In this session, I’ll show you how to shape Copilot into a coding assistant that feels like an extension of your own brain. We'll walk through practical techniques, from crafting meaningful instruction files, giving Copilot the right context, refining its suggestions through feedback loops, and avoiding common pitfalls that break the “flow” in complex or long‑running projects.

At the end of this session, you’ll know how to transform Copilot from a generic autocomplete engine into a personalized coding partner, letting you stay focused on the real challenge: thinking through great software.

Building Intelligent Apps with Microsoft Foundry

Microsoft Foundry has become Microsoft’s unified platform for building, deploying, and governing AI applications. It consolidates what used to be a fragmented landscape of tools and services into a single, end‑to‑end developer environment, streamlining the entire AI lifecycle.

From experimentation to production, offering integrated model access, enterprise security, and managed deployments without the usual operational overhead. This shift enables developers to focus on building intelligent features instead of managing infrastructure complexity.

In this talk, I’ll walk you through how Microsoft Foundry works from a developer’s perspective: how to use the Microsoft Foundry SDK to access models through a single interface, combine them with AI services like Speech, Vision, and Document Intelligence. We'll also look at how development and deployment comes together, from building a solution locally to deploying it directly into Foundry's managed infrastructure.

By the end of this session, you’ll understand how to build AI applications faster and more reliably using Microsoft Foundry. How to use its SDK to access models and services through a unified interface, how to structure your projects for real‑world deployment, and how to take advantage of its managed platform to ship production‑ready intelligent features without worrying about servers, scaling, or complex orchestration