Eric Boyd
Founder & CEO, responsiveX, Azure & AI MVP, Microsoft RD
Chicago, Illinois, United States
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Eric D. Boyd is a highly experienced entrepreneur, public speaker, and author with nearly 30 years of experience in the technology industry. He is the founder and CEO of responsiveX, a Microsoft partner and digital innovation consultancy. Eric is a sought-after speaker and thought leader, delivering keynote speeches, breakout sessions, and participating in panel discussions at many industry events. He is a Microsoft Azure and AI MVP, a Regional Director, and has extensive experience helping organizations with system design and architecture, cloud-native development, and artificial intelligence. Eric is the co-author of "Step-by-Step Azure SQL Database" and has contributed to several other publications. He shares his expertise and insights through his blog, social media, podcast interviews, and educational videos. Eric is committed to giving back to the community and supporting the next generation of technology leaders.
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Modern desktop virtualization with Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop
The way we deliver secure, managed desktops has evolved dramatically. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Windows 365 (W365) sit at the center of modern, zero-trust remote and hybrid work strategies. Whether you’re supporting frontline workers, contractors, developers, or a distributed workforce, the combination of Cloud PCs and flexible VDI has become a critical part of the enterprise stack.
In this session, you'll learn how organizations are deploying AVD and Windows 365 today using cloud-native identity, zero-trust networking, Intune-based management, and modern provisioning patterns. We’ll walk through current architectural models, updated identity and access controls, image strategies, application delivery options, security baselines, GPU-enabled workloads, cost optimization techniques, and real-world lessons learned from large-scale deployments. You’ll also see how to choose between AVD and Windows 365, or how to combine them.
Whether you're planning your first deployment or modernizing existing VDI, this session will give you the clarity and tactical guidance needed to deliver secure, performant, and cost-effective cloud desktops.
Modern Testing Strategies for .NET Developers
Modern software applications are distributed, data-driven, API-first, and cloud-native, making software testing more challenging and more important than ever. As software developers, we also want to boost our productivity by taking advantage of AI coding agents. To do this safely and effectively, a modern testing strategy is essential.
In this session, you’ll learn how to modernize your testing approach across the full stack including unit tests, integration tests, API tests, UI automation, performance testing, and even chaos engineering. We’ll explore the latest capabilities in .NET, Azure, and GitHub, including Testcontainers, Playwright, Azure Load Testing, and more. You’ll leave with practical techniques you can apply immediately to improve quality, accelerate releases, and build confidence in your applications.
Monitor your applications and infrastructure
Your users would love for you to know about and correct issues before they find them. Application Insights and Azure Monitor enable you to collect usage, error, and telemetry data from your applications that can be used to detect and diagnose issues, analyze how your users interact with your applications, determine where to invest development effort, and ultimately enable you to provide your users with a better experience. Azure Log Analytics provides further capabilities to monitor the health of your infrastructure, services, and get a single pane-of-glass for monitoring the overall health of your solutions.
Join this session to learn how to get deeper insights into the health and usage of your solutions using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Azure Log Analytics, and the built-in capabilities of .NET to deliver great user experiences.
Notebooks Aren’t Just for Python Developers: Exploring .NET Interactive and Polyglot Notebooks
Do you think notebooks are just for Python developers and data scientists? Think again.
In this session, we’ll explore how .NET Interactive and Polyglot Notebooks bring the power of Jupyter-style development to enterprise Microsoft developers, right inside Visual Studio Code.
You’ll learn how to write and run C#, PowerShell, SQL, JavaScript, and more in a single notebook, with support for rich outputs like tables, charts, and interactive visualizations. This is a practical tool for building living documentation, prototyping APIs, exploring data, and automating tasks in a clear, reproducible format.
We’ll cover real-world use cases such as prototyping business logic in C# without the overhead of spinning up full projects, creating interactive documentation that blends code, visuals, and explanations, exploring and querying enterprise data using embedded SQL and C#, and streamlining scripting and automation by combining PowerShell and .NET in a single, unified notebook workspace.
Python for .NET Developers – Becoming a Multi-Sport Developer
Do you have what it takes to be a multi-sport developer?
If you're a .NET developer, you’ve likely encountered Python in data science, artificial intelligence (AI), DevOps, cybersecurity, and other development projects. If you don’t know Python, you should probably add learning it to your training regimen. Thanks to the rapid growth of data science, machine learning, and AI, Python is currently the most popular programming language. It’s the programming world’s version of a rising all-star - versatile, powerful, and dominant, where productivity and flexibility matter.
Like an athlete cross-training for a new event, learning a new language can be intimidating, especially if you don’t know where to begin. This session is designed to help .NET developers get productive in Python quickly, using tools you are already familiar with and connecting the dots between the two ecosystems and languages.
We'll explore key differences and similarities in syntax, structure, and types - then dive into examples that show how to:
• Translate common C# programming patterns to Python
• Work with popular libraries like pandas, requests, and more
• Develop in familiar environments like VS Code and explore Jupyter Notebooks
• Avoid common pitfalls when moving between languages
• And interact across your Python and .NET projects
Whether you’re building AI models, automating infrastructure, or exploring data pipelines, Python is an important skill for the modern developer. Think of this session as your training ground to become a well-rounded, multi-sport developer, ready to compete in any event the industry throws your way.
Rapidly Create Intelligent AI Agents with Copilot Studio
AI agents are no longer experimental; they are becoming core building blocks for enterprise automation, productivity, and user interaction. Copilot Studio is Microsoft’s low-code platform for building intelligent AI agents that can reason, act, and integrate securely across your organization.
In this session, you’ll learn how to use Copilot Studio to rapidly create enterprise-ready AI agents that go far beyond simple chatbots. We’ll explore how generative orchestration replaces rigid dialog trees, how to define agent behavior using topics, triggers, and actions, and how to ground responses in trusted enterprise data. You’ll see how to connect agents to real systems using APIs, Power Platform connectors, and Microsoft 365 integrations, enabling agents to take meaningful action on behalf of users.
We’ll also cover agent memory, multi-turn conversation design, and built-in governance capabilities—showing how Copilot Studio helps teams build, deploy, and manage AI agents that deliver real business value while meeting enterprise security and compliance requirements.
Scalable Data Engineering and Analysis with PySpark in Microsoft Fabric
In this session, you’ll discover how to use PySpark in Microsoft Fabric to build scalable, Python-based data transformation pipelines while staying within the familiar Microsoft analytics ecosystem. You'll learn how PySpark integrates with OneLake and Fabric Lakehouses, and how to use notebooks to clean, transform, join, and enrich data from multiple sources. We’ll also explore how to leverage Spark SQL and the Pandas API on Spark to work efficiently with large datasets, and how to write your results back to the Lakehouse for use with tools like Power BI.
This session is ideal for data engineers and analysts ready to expand beyond traditional SQL workflows and tap into the full power of Python in Microsoft Fabric. No Spark experience is needed, just a curiosity to scale your data skills.
Securing Your Software Supply Chain
Software isn’t built from scratch, it’s assembled from open-source libraries, tools, build systems, CI/CD pipelines, cloud services, and container images. That makes your software supply chain one of the biggest attack surfaces in your organization. From dependency confusion and malicious npm, NuGet, and pip packages to insecure GitHub Actions and tampered build artifacts, attackers are increasingly targeting the components that developers rely on every day.
In this session, you’ll learn how to secure your supply chain end-to-end using proven tools and practices across GitHub, Azure, and the open-source ecosystem. We’ll dive into GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS), OWASP Dependency-Check, SBOM generation, package signing, secure workflows, artifact provenance, and SLSA-compliant pipelines. You’ll see how to detect vulnerabilities early, lock down your CI/CD pipeline, enforce safe dependency usage, and generate trusted artifacts that your organization and your customers can rely on.
If you build software, this session will show you exactly how to protect your code, your builds, your packages, and your supply chain.
Vector Search to GraphRAG: Modern Retrieval Patterns for Enterprise AI
As enterprises adopt AI copilots, agents, and knowledge-driven applications, retrieval is becoming the backbone of accuracy, trust, and real-world usefulness. Modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) now goes far beyond “chat over documents”, it blends vector search, hybrid search, graph-based reasoning, contextual compression, tool-using agents, and enterprise knowledge bases.
In this session, Eric D. Boyd guides you through the next generation of retrieval techniques and shows how to build them with Azure AI Search, Microsoft Foundry, and Foundry IQ. You’ll learn how embeddings work, how to design high-quality indexes, how to implement advanced ranking and context engineering strategies, and how to use GraphRAG and agentic retrieval to deliver domain-specialized copilots and intelligent agents. With .NET-focused examples and real-world patterns, you'll walk away knowing how to build retrieval systems that are accurate, scalable, and enterprise-ready.
Modern Authentication and Authorization with OIDC, OAuth2, and Fine-grained Permissions
Open web standards for authentication, authorization and delegation are especially important in our connected, integrated, and mobile world. There are expectations for single sign-on, integration with external partners, multi-tenancy, identity across application tiers, and authentication with multiple identity providers.
In this session, you will learn about the OpenId Connect (OIDC) and OAuth2 standards. You'll learn how to get started with Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Active Directory B2C, and Duende IdentityServer. You'll learn how to integrate modern identity protocols into your applications and APIs. And you'll also learn how to implement resource-based and fine-grained permissions in your applications.
Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code
Are you curious about Jupyter notebooks?
In this fast-paced session, you'll learn how to get up and running with Jupyter notebooks right inside Visual Studio Code. We’ll walk through installing the right extensions, opening and running notebooks, and using key features like interactive plots, variable explorers, and inline debugging.
Whether you're exploring data, prototyping models, or learning Python, this session will give you everything you need to start using Jupyter in VS Code.
Lakehouses, Warehouses, and OneLake Explained: Architecting with Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric brings together multiple analytical engines, including the Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, KQL Database, and Real-Time Intelligence, on top of a unified OneLake architecture. But with all these options, how do you choose the right one for your solution?
In this session, we’ll break down the architectural foundations of Fabric and demystify when to use each compute experience. You’ll learn how Delta Lake, shortcuts, dataflows, and medallion architecture influence your design choices; how OneLake enforces a unified, open, and governed storage layer; and how to build end-to-end workloads that flow from ingestion to transformation to semantic modeling in Power BI.
Whether you're modernizing an enterprise data platform, moving from Synapse or Azure Databricks, or designing greenfield analytics, this session will give you the clarity you need to make smart architectural decisions. You’ll leave with actionable patterns for ingestion, transformation, and semantic modeling, and real-world guidance to pick the right Fabric experience based on performance, cost, scalability, governance, and integration needs.
Mastering the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework
The Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) provides the proven guidance, architecture patterns, and implementation tools that help organizations confidently adopt Microsoft Azure at enterprise scale. For IT pros and system engineers, governance, networking, identity, security, operations, automation, and cost management all have to come together in a consistent, repeatable, and compliant environment.
In this session, you’ll learn how to design, deploy, and operate Azure enterprise landing zones (ALZ) using the CAF architecture, patterns, and tooling. We’ll walk through the core components of landing zones including management groups, identity and access strategy, network topology (hub-and-spoke and mesh), policy-driven governance, security baselines, automation with Infrastructure-as-Code, and operational practices for monitoring, backup, resilience, and lifecycle management.
You’ll also discover how tools like Azure Landing Zone Accelerator, Infrastructure-as-Code (Bicep/Terraform), Platform Automation & DevOps, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud fit into the broader enterprise platform. Through real-world examples and patterns from customer deployments, you’ll learn how to build a secure, scalable, compliant foundation that supports cloud workloads from initial migration to modernization and AI-driven innovation.
Whether you're planning your first enterprise landing zone or looking to enhance an existing platform, this session will give you the architectural clarity and practical guidance to accelerate secure cloud adoption with confidence.
Harnessing the Power of Asynchronous Messaging and Eventing for Distributed Systems at Scale
Distributed applications, microservices solutions and systems at scale depend on In today's era of distributed applications, microservices, and systems at scale, the key to achieving agility, resilience, and scalability lies in mastering the art of asynchronous messaging and eventing.
In this session I will delve deep into the world of asynchronous messaging and event-driven architectures. We will explore messaging design patterns such as competing consumers, pub/sub, event sourcing, command query responsibility segregation (CQRS), and more. You will gain an understanding of how these patterns can improve your system design and development. We will explore the benefits of decoupled, event-driven systems and how they contribute to fault tolerance, scalability, and adaptability in complex ecosystems.
I will demonstrate implementing the messaging and eventing patterns showing you how to put these concepts into practice using platforms like Azure Service Bus, Event Hubs, and Event Grid. You'll learn hands-on techniques for building robust, event-driven solutions that can handle the demands of modern, distributed applications.
Lastly, I will guide you through real-world use cases and practical insights, equipping you with the knowledge and tools to harness asynchronous messaging.
Whether you are an experienced developer looking to expand your skill set or an architect seeking to optimize your system's design, this session promises valuable insights and practical takeaways to help you create resilient, scalable, and responsive systems. messaging and eventing to achieve their goals.
Hacking & Securing ASP.NET Web Apps and Web APIs
Web applications and Web APIs remain the top target of attackers. .NET developers must know how their applications can be exploited in order to secure them effectively. In this fast-paced, demo-driven session, you'll step into the shoes of an ethical hacker to see how real vulnerabilities are found, exploited, and mitigated in ASP.NET Core and modern Web APIs.
We’ll walk through live demonstrations of attacks like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), CSRF, broken authentication, insecure deserialization, BOLA (Broken Object Level Authorization), and more,showing how simple mistakes can create serious risks. Then you'll learn how to harden your applications using built-in ASP.NET Core capabilities, secure coding patterns, minimal APIs, rate limiting, and modern authentication/authorization practices.
Finally, you’ll see how Microsoft Azure helps protect your applications with services such as API Management, Front Door, WAF, Key Vault, Defender for Cloud, and GitHub Advanced Security.
You'll leave with a practical, developer-focused playbook for protecting your web applications and APIs from today's most dangerous threats.
Enterprise AI with Microsoft Foundry: Building Intelligent, Production-Ready Apps
AI experimentation is easy. Enterprise AI is not. Real-world AI systems must be secure, governed, observable, testable, integrated with enterprise data, cost-efficient, and reliable at scale. In this session, Eric D. Boyd will show you how Microsoft Foundry helps developers navigate all 13 Considerations for Enterprise AI and turn powerful models into production-grade solutions.
You’ll learn how to work with the Foundry model catalog, ground models with enterprise data, fine-tune models, build agents and integrate with tools like Microsoft Fabric using the Foundry Agent Service, integrate AI into .NET applications using the Foundry SDK, and apply responsible AI and governance patterns across your entire lifecycle. Through demos and real examples, you'll see what it takes to move from prototype to production, and how Microsoft Foundry simplifies the journey.
Enterprise AI for IT Pros: Architecting, Securing, and Operating AI at Scale
Artificial intelligence is no longer an experiment, it’s becoming a core part of enterprise infrastructure, operations, and security. As organizations accelerate their AI adoption, IT professionals are now at the center of deploying, governing, securing, and operationalizing AI systems across the enterprise.
In this session, you’ll get a practical, IT-focused deep dive into Enterprise AI with Azure and Microsoft Foundry. We’ll cut through the hype and focus on what IT Pros need to know to support, run, and safeguard AI in the real world. You’ll learn how to design enterprise-ready AI environments, integrate AI workloads securely into your existing infrastructure, enforce governance and compliance, and ensure observability, reliability, and cost control.
We’ll walk through the 13 Considerations for Enterprise AI, including identity, security, data protection, networking, compliance, monitoring, cost governance, model lifecycle management, MLOps, policy enforcement, operational readiness, and more. I'll show how Azure and Microsoft Foundry work across these critical domains. Expect demos, architecture guidance, and actionable patterns you can bring back to your organization immediately.
Whether your organization is building copilots, rolling out agentic AI, deploying RAG systems, or integrating AI models into business applications, this session will equip you with the knowledge to deploy AI securely, reliably, and at enterprise scale.
Enrich your apps and AI agents with keyword and vector search
Search is by far the most popular way for users to find things within your applications. And a great keyword and semantic search implementation provides a much better user experience than categorical drill downs and deep taxonomies.
To enhance your custom AI agents with your organization's intelligence, you likely need a vector database and vector search.
Azure AI Search makes it possible to implement robust keyword, semantic, and vector search within your applications and AI agents without building search infrastructure and developing a search engine.
In this session, you will learn how to get started with Azure AI Search. We will walk through setting up indexes and will populate our indexes with data. Lastly, we will integrate search into applications and AI assistants and take advantage of the power of Azure AI Search.
Eliminating Secret Sprawl with Azure Managed Identity & Azure Key Vault
Managing credentials across sprawling application configurations is one of the biggest security and operational challenges facing IT Pros today. Hard-coded passwords, shared keys, connection strings, certificates, and service principals create unnecessary attack surface, complicate audits, and make it nearly impossible to maintain strong security hygiene at scale.
In this session, you’ll learn how to eliminate secret sprawl by shifting to identity-driven, zero-trust access with Azure Managed Identity and Azure Key Vault. We’ll explore how to remove secrets entirely from application code and configuration, securely authenticate workloads without credentials, and centralize secrets, certificates, and keys with robust governance and rotation policies. You’ll walk through real-world patterns for Azure VMs, App Services, Functions, containers, and automation scenarios, along with common pitfalls, migration techniques, and operational best practices.
By the end, you’ll be equipped with the practical knowledge to modernize your organization’s approach to secrets, reduce risk, and simplify operations through secure-by-default Azure platform capabilities.
Elevate Your Career with Python and AI
According to the TIOBE Index, Python currently stands as the most popular programming language. It’s remarkable trajectory over the past three decades can be attributed to its inherent simplicity, an expansive ecosystem of libraries and packages, and its remarkable versatility across a diverse array of domains including data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, IoT, robotics, and automated task execution.
Embark on a two-day journey to learn a new programming language with far-reaching applicability. As the language of choice for data science, advanced research, and the expanding field of AI, Python will propel you into the heart of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Join Microsoft Azure MVP, Eric D. Boyd, for an immersive hands-on lab, a two-day expedition into the world of Python, AI, and ML. You don’t need to have any prior knowledge of Python or AI to attend. We'll begin with the bedrock principles of Python. And on day two, we will explore the foundations of artificial intelligence and machine learning through many types of problems, scenarios, and algorithms.
Day 1 – Getting Started with Python
On Day 1, we will begin by getting a modern Python development environment set up with Visual Studio Code. Once everyone is up and running, we’ll spend the rest of the day exploring the Python language and writing Python code together, focusing on the parts of Python that matter most for today’s software developers, data engineers, and AI developers.
We’ll start with the fundamentals, including variables, data types, functions, conditionals, loops, and error handling, then quickly move into Pythonic patterns and conventions established by the Python community that make your code readable, maintainable, and production-ready. Along the way, we’ll work with core data structures, comprehensions, and powerful language features like type hints, dataclasses, and modules so you can structure and reuse code effectively. You’ll also get a practical introduction to object-oriented design in Python, learning how to design and organize classes for real applications.
From there, we’ll explore what’s available in the built-in Python standard library and the broader ecosystem of Python packages and libraries that you’ll use in practice, including popular libraries like NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib. You’ll see how to manage dependencies and environments, use Notebooks for interactive exploration, and bring your Python skills into data and analytics workflows with platforms like Microsoft Fabric.
As a developer, one of the most important things you can do to create great software is test your code. In addition to exploring the troubleshooting and debugging capabilities of Visual Studio Code, we’ll introduce automated testing so you can gain confidence in your Python code from the start.
Closing out Day 1, we will bring it all together by building a small, AI‑ready Python service. We’ll create a web app using Flask and FastAPI that will show how the foundational Python skills you’ve learned can power applications and services that call modern AI and machine learning models.
Before we conclude, we'll also see how to leverage Python's strengths from the .NET ecosystem by calling Python code from C# applications using CSnakes.
Day 2 – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence using Python
To attend Day 2 of this lab, you must have either attended Day 1 of this workshop or have a strong working knowledge of Python with a functional Python development environment. There will not be any time spent on day 2 teaching Python fundamentals or setting up Python development environments.
Artificial intelligence is a machine’s ability to perform the cognitive functions we usually associate with human minds. And there are many challenging problems that we face as developers of technology solutions that can be simplified using techniques and algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence.
On Day 2, you will immediately get to employ your newfound knowledge of Python to craft innovative solutions across the pivotal domains of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Together, we will delve into the foundations of artificial intelligence, spanning the topics of search algorithms, knowledge representation, uncertainty modeling, optimization strategies, machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing. This dynamic learning experience will be underpinned by the utilization of established libraries such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, NLTK, and more.
We will also explore other platforms like Azure Machine Learning to create and deploy machine learning models and solutions, and how you can use your Python knowledge and skills with Azure Machine Learning.
And our journey won’t conclude there. You’ll get to embark on a journey through the emerging world of generative AI, large language models, and prompt engineering. We will explore LLMs and AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and more. We'll learn how to use LLMs with your private data, and how to navigate the world of prompt engineering using tools like LangChain, opening doors to novel applications and possibilities in language-driven AI systems. We'll also explore how to build Agentic LLM-orchestrated AI solutions that can autonomously perform tasks and make decisions.
Unlock the potential of Python and AI over the course of two days in a hands-on environment where theory evolves into tangible skills, and where your career potential gains an invaluable edge.
Developer’s Guide to Fabric Pipelines & Data Engineering Workflows
Microsoft Fabric is reshaping how organizations build modern analytics and AI platforms by unifying data engineering, data science, real-time analytics, and BI on a single SaaS foundation. But for developers and data engineers, the real power shows up in the pipelines and orchestration capabilities that move and transform data reliably at scale.
In this session, you’ll get a practical, developer-focused tour of building end-to-end data engineering workflows in Microsoft Fabric. We’ll walk through how to design, build, and operate pipelines using Data Factory experiences in Fabric, notebooks, dataflows, and Lakehouses/Warehouses. You’ll see how to connect to common sources, orchestrate ingestion and transformation, manage environments, and integrate Fabric with your existing .NET and Azure architectures.
We’ll also dig into best practices for CI/CD, parametric pipelines, monitoring and alerting, and how to design workflows that support analytics, AI, and real-time scenarios without creating another “accidental data swamp.” If you’re a developer or data engineer who wants to get beyond the marketing and actually ship reliable Fabric-based data solutions, this session is for you.
Designing & Developing Modern Web APIs with .NET 10, OpenAPI, and Azure
Modern applications rely on well-designed, secure, and scalable web APIs. However, being successful across the lifecycle of web API design to operations can be challenging and time-consuming.
In this session, you'll learn how to design, build, document, secure, deploy, and operate high-quality APIs using .NET 10, OpenAPI, and Azure's API platform. We'll explore API-first design principles, walk through the newest .NET 10 capabilities for Minimal APIs and controllers, and show how to integrate your APIs with Azure services like API Management, App Service, Entra ID, and Azure Monitor. You'll also see how to use OpenAPI to drive consistency, automate client generation, and enforce contracts across teams.
Whether you're modernizing legacy APIs or building new cloud-native microservices, you'll walk away with practical patterns, tooling insights, and demos to help you deliver robust, secure, and future-ready APIs.
Building MCP Servers with C# and .NET
AI agents are quickly becoming a first-class part of modern applications, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as the standard way to equip those agents with tools, data, and enterprise-grade capabilities. In this session, you’ll learn how to build MCP servers using C# and .NET, enabling your applications, copilots, and agentic workflows to interact with your business logic, APIs, and data in a secure and structured way.
We’ll walk through the fundamentals of MCP, how to implement tools and resources with .NET, and how to integrate your MCP server with developer experiences like VS Code, OpenAI clients, and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service. You’ll see end-to-end examples ranging from simple utilities to enterprise workflows that connect to SQL, Azure services, Microsoft Graph, and more.
Whether you’re building agent-powered applications or want to expose your .NET systems as reusable tools, this session will show you how to turn your .NET expertise into powerful AI integrations.
ASP.NET Web APIs from Design to Production
Streamline your API journey with OpenAPI, ASP.NET, Azure, and other practices and tools.
Web APIs are essential for building modern web applications that communicate with data and services. However, being successful across the lifecycle of web API design to operations can be challenging and time-consuming.
In this session, you will gain insights into the practices and tools that will help you be successful designing, developing, and operationalizing your Web APIs. We will begin with an introduction to OpenAPI and its role in API program success. You’ll see how to design your APIs using tools like Visual Studio Code utilizing the many free extensions that are available to you. We’ll also look at some commercial tools you might find helpful as you’re designing your APIs. We’ll discuss industry standards and best practices for Web API design and show you how you can validate your API definitions against the standards and rules you set for your organization.
You will learn how to prototype and mock your API. We’ll walk through some approaches to accelerating your development by generating ASP.NET Web API scaffolding and strongly typed API Clients from your OpenAPI definitions. We’ll also explore various testing techniques and consider ways to deploy your APIs to Azure.
Lastly, we’ll discuss managing and governing your APIs with the API Gateway pattern using Azure API Management and Azure Application Gateway. We’ll explore modern identity and security using OpenID Connect and OAuth2. And we’ll monitor the health and operations of our APIs using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Log Analytics. Join this session to learn how to use OpenAPI, ASP.NET, Azure, and a collection of tools that you should have in your toolbox to be successful with your API programs.
Agentic AI for Developers: Creating AI Agents with Microsoft Foundry Agent Service
Agentic AI is rapidly emerging as a powerful paradigm for building intelligent systems that can reason, plan, and act autonomously to achieve complex goals. With the new Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, Microsoft is enabling developers to create, deploy, and manage AI agents that can orchestrate tools, interact with users, and integrate deeply into enterprise workflows.
In this session, you’ll learn the foundations of agentic AI and how to bring them to life with Microsoft’s newest agent platform. You’ll explore agent architecture, capabilities, tools/actions, memory, multi-agent collaboration patterns, MCP integrations, grounding with enterprise data, and secure deployment inside Microsoft Azure. Real-world examples and live demos will show how agents can automate workflows, interact with APIs and .NET services, generate insights from enterprise data, and power new kinds of intelligent applications.
Monitor your applications and infrastructure
Your users would love for you to know about and correct issues before they find them. Application Insights enables you to collect usage, error and telemetry data from your applications that can be used to detect and diagnose issues, analyze how your users interact with your applications, determine where to invest development effort, and ultimately enable you to provide your users with a better experience. Azure Log Analytics provides further capabilities to monitor the health of your infrastructure, services and get a single pane-of-glass for monitoring the overall health of your solutions.
Join this session to learn how to get deeper insights into the health and usage of your solutions using Application Insights, Azure Log Analytics and Power BI to ultimately provide great user experiences.
Predicting the Future using Azure Machine Learning
What if you could predict the future? How would that impact your business?
Predictive Analytics is a huge step towards making better and more informed business decisions and ultimately predicting future outcomes. As a society, the amount of data we are creating and storing is growing at an unprecedented rate. Making use of this historical data to predict future outcomes and identifying previously unknown relationships is what predictive analytics, data science, and machine learning is all about.
In this session, you will learn the fundamentals of predictive analytics, data science algorithms, and how to use Azure Machine Learning to identify associations and relationships in your data, and predict future outcomes. In addition, you will learn how you can expose this capability to other developers and integrate machine learning into your applications, without being a data scientist or machine learning expert.
Using API Gateways for flexibility and governance of your APIs
One of the challenges of microservices architectures is that clients need to connect to many services, with multiple endpoints, each possibly having different design and implementation characteristics.
The solution to this problem is a common microservices design patterns called API Gateway, which is simply a way to provide a single entry point for clients to connect, and the gateway will route and proxy requests to the appropriate services, do any needed transformation to create a unified experience for the clients.
You can write another application to be the API Gateway, or you could use existing services in Azure. Join this session to learn how to use API Management, Application Gateway and Azure Functions to create an API Gateway for your microservices.
Storage Strategies in Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure provides many options for data storage. Trying to make sense of all the options can be overwhelming. In this session, we will explore the Azure data services including SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Blob Storage, Files, and more. We will walk through the scenarios that each data service addresses, and we will dive into how to work with each of them. Lastly, we will explore the factors that encourage using one service over another when multiple fit into your solution and how they can complement each other when used together.
Securing Application Secrets with Azure Key Vault
As developers, we are constantly working with secrets and cryptographic keys, and often these secrets are handled with the appropriate caution and care. We have SSL/TLS certificates and their private keys laying around on file systems, connection strings and passwords in config files, and secrets in code. And this is not good.
Azure Key Vault is a cloud-based key management solution that can help and in this session we will walk through the capabilities of Azure Key Vault and explore how you protect and generate your secrets. You will learn how to get secrets out of your configuration files, applications and version control systems, rotate your keys automatically, and more.
Practical Internet of Things for the Microsoft Developer
Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot tech buzzword right now, and it ranges from wearables like the Fitbit to home automation like Nest and WeMo. But is this trend limited to a small set of companies and hobbyist hackers, or is it something broader and applicable to the masses?
In this session, Azure MVP Eric D. Boyd will give you a practical view of IoT starting by defining what IoT is, and the various components that are required and optional components that can enhance IoT solutions. We will then walk through how to get started creating IoT devices, sensors and clients with Windows.
While devices are fun to build and play with, the most interesting piece of IoT is the backend and the data. As a result, next we will create a backend for working with IoT data at mass scale using Azure’s IoT Suite, and using that data to build valuable analytics and insight.
Finally, Eric will present a framework for identifying and evaluating IoT opportunities in your organizations.
If you want to demystify IoT, cut through the hype, and get to practical scenarios and applications, you will not want to miss this session.
Developing Modern Web Apps with Azure
Modern web apps typically consist of web front-ends, web APIs and background jobs, and these all need to be secured with modern identity protocols. These modern web apps typically store data in multiple data platforms including relational databases like SQL Server, NoSql JSON document databases, and files. And we ultimately want to provide great experiences and solutions that our users love to use.
Microsoft Azure enables these modern web apps by providing lots of data centers around the world, a huge collection of services that enable robust capabilities in your web apps, and a developer-friendly environment that makes it easy for you to create, deploy and manage your web apps.
In this workshop, you will walk through building a modern web app using platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), serverless capabilities, containers, and microservices architectures in Azure. You will learn how to do background processing without needing to manage servers and virtual machines. And you will learn how to build and manage robust APIs. Throughout the development of the application, we will provision services and deploy in Azure, and you will learn to think about DevOps early on using tools like Azure DevOps and Azure Resource Management.
Next, we will enable modern identity in our application using OpenId Connect and OAuth 2.0 with Azure Active Directory. We will explore both the enterprise scenarios using AAD B2B, and we will also consider the consumer scenarios using AAD B2C. In addition to getting information about a user via security claims, you will learn how to interrogate the Azure Active Directory Graph API to get additional information. In addition to Azure Active Directory, we will explore alternatives like IdentityServer.
Then, we will integrate data into our application using various data services like Azure SQL Database, Storage and Cosmos DB.
Lastly, we will optimize user experience, performance and availability by using application-level caching, edge routing using Azure Traffic Manager, and edge caching using Azure CDN. And we will explore security and disaster recovery in Azure.
Before we conclude, we will also consider adding further capabilities including search and AI using services like Azure Search, Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Service.
Architecting and Developing Microservices Apps
Microservices are the next evolution of application architecture and service design. The design patterns and principles from Service-Oriented Architecture provided good guidance for service design, and now Microservices enhances SOA with architectures and platforms for operationalizing services through platforms like Azure Functions, Azure App Service, and Containers and Kubernetes with messaging platforms like Service Bus and EventHubs.
In this session, you will get a lap around Microservices. We will begin with a quick refresh on the design patterns that guide well-designed microservices architectures. We will then take an example monolithic application and break it down into a microservices architecture. Next, we will explore the benefits of platforms like Azure Functions, Azure App Services and Containers with Azure Kubernetes Service. Lastly, we will walk through building and running microservices using these tools and platforms.
Lock the Doors, Secure the Valuables, and Set the Alarm
Data center attacks and security breaches are hot, but common news today. When considering the cloud, security, privacy, and compliance are often top concerns. And rightfully so, you don’t want to be the next big news story.
Join Azure MVP, Eric D. Boyd, and learn how to secure your Azure Data Center by reducing the exposure for attacks, locking down internal and external communications, protecting your data, and monitoring the activities within your Azure environment.
You will get a lap around a number of Azure capabilities including network security groups, Key Vault, VM disk encryption, SQL Database security, Azure Security Center, Next-Generation Firewalls, Web Application Firewalls, and more.
Messaging Patterns for Distributed and Scalable Applications
Distributed applications, microservices solutions and systems at scale depend on asynchronous messaging and eventing to achieve their goals.
In this session, you will learn how to effectively utilize messaging and eventing solutions with common complex event processing patterns like event sourcing, CQRS, and more.
You'll also learn how to develop solutions implementing these patterns using platforms like Service Bus and Event Hubs.
Go Serverless with Azure Functions
Idle CPU cycles are wasteful, but it’s very likely that you have far more computing capacity than you use.
However, serverless compute architectures have arrived to save us from that waste. Serverless is a shift in how we think about provisioning compute resources and paying for these resources from cloud providers. Instead of deploying resources and underutilizing them, you truly pay for consumption and the compute cycles you use.
Join Azure MVP, Eric D. Boyd to learn how Microsoft is enabling serverless compute in Azure with Azure Functions. In this session, you will learn what serverless architectures and Azure Functions are all about. You will get an overview of how to get started developing and running serverless code. And you will explore how to integrate with other services and trigger your code from events throughout Azure and even in data centers outside of Azure.
In addition to the fundamentals of developing and deploying serverless code in Azure Functions, you will learn about the tooling and DevOps capabilities that exist for working with Functions. And last, but not least, we will model the pricing together so you understand the billing model and what to expect when running Azure Functions and when to use Azure Functions over other platforms.
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Eric Boyd
Founder & CEO, responsiveX, Azure & AI MVP, Microsoft RD
Chicago, Illinois, United States
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