Alex Thissen
Cloud buster
Hedel, The Netherlands
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Alex is an application development enthusiast since the late nineties and works as an architect, lead developer and mentor at large enterprises and small companies. He spends his time teaching other developers the details of the Microsoft development platform and frameworks, and coaches architects to design and build modern distributed applications at cloud scale. He has received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for Visual Studio and Development Technologies since 2007. In his spare time Alex likes to participate in all kinds of sport, and loves playing and programming new and retro video games.
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DevContainers for Azure cloud platform engineers
You have discovered DevContainers as a great way to get a development environment set up in no time. You might be wondering what more there is to development containers for platform engineers.
In this session we will have a deeper look at DevContainers and find out about reuse, automation and team work, as well as running specialized tooling for Infrastructure as Code and cloud development.
You will also learn how to create templates and features yourself and build these in CI/CD pipelines. We are going to look at more complex scenarios that involve container compositions and dependencies. For teams we will cover versioning strategies for the DevContainer definitions, as well as personalization of the developer experience. To top it of, some nice tips and tricks and inner workings of development containers for anyone working with or for Azure cloud.
Creating an observable cloud platform and application landscape with Azure
In this session you will learn how to build and create a cloud platform for your applications that offers observability and monitoring capabilities. You are going to be introduced to the Azure resources for monitoring and operations and learn how to architect the landscape for multiple applications and business domains. Also, we will have a look at instrumenting applications with OpenTelemetry and the various patterns and practices to collect, filter and combine telemetry signals into an observable backplane. Combined with the Azure resources, the outcome is an environment that is capable to host, monitor and operate observable applications. You will see how this can help you in everyday situations in getting insights into and gaining control over your cloud-native applications running in Azure.
Beyond Logs: Using Telemetry to Understand Real User Value
In this session, you will learn how to use logging and metrics to uncover whether your code is actually being used, identify opportunities to streamline your application, and see if users are interacting with it as intended. We'll explore practical techniques for collecting and interpreting telemetry to make data-driven decisions about your features. This talk is ideal for anyone who wants to measure and gain more value from their applications. Expect actionable insights that will help you understand your users better and prioritize the features that truly matter.
Agents Demystified
In this session, you will learn what AI agents are, how they operate behind the scenes, and how to leverage existing frameworks to streamline your agent development process. We'll cover the core concepts of AI agents and provide practical examples to help you identify opportunities for creating agents that deliver real value in your organization.
This talk is perfect for software developers looking to get started with AI and agents. Expect to leave with the knowledge and tools needed to build your own intelligent solutions and enhance your projects.
Unlocking the potential of OpenAPI with .NET 10
In this session, learn how OpenAPI can transform how you describe, version, and distribute your .NET backend APIs. We'll dive into how to implement Web APIs in .NET 10 using a code-first approach while seamlessly generating OpenAPI definitions. Discover how to streamline your workflow, manage API versions effectively, and provide your consumers with robust clients and documentation, all powered by OpenAPI.
DevContainers Deep Dive: beyond the basics
You have discovered DevContainers as a great way to get a development environment set up in no time. You might be wondering what more there is to development containers.
In this session we will have a deeper look at DevContainers and find out about reuse, automation and team work. You will learn how to create templates and features yourself and build these in CI/CD pipelines. Same thing for prebuilt images. We are going to look at more complex scenarios that involve container compositions and dependencies. For teams we will cover versioning strategies for the DevContainer definitions, as well as personalization of the developer experience. To top it of, some nice tips and tricks and inner workings of development containers.
Building cloud-native microservices with Dapr
Modern distributed applications require much more than just application logic. Features such as state management for services, communication using publish/subscribe messaging and event-driven binding to cloud resources might be needed. Dapr introduces a runtime to offer such building blocks, and is less invasive in your application, allowing you to pick and choose what you need. In this workshop, we will look at the approach that the Dapr runtime takes with a sidecar architecture, separating application logic from the Dapr runtime components. You learn to develop distributed applications in .NET using Dapr's features and, how to bind to messaging infrastructure and cloud resources.
Dapr on GitHub Codespaces workshop
Dapr is an open source, event-driven, portable runtime for building microservices. It provides powerful building blocks to make it easy for developers to build resilient microservice applications using a variety of languages and frameworks.
In this workshop you will get an introduction of Dapr and the Dapr building blocks. After that, you will learn how to apply Dapr yourself in a sample application during the hands-on part of the workshop.
The workshop features step-by-step instructions. During the workshop you will get hands-on experience with the following Dapr building blocks: service invocation, state management, pub/sub, bindings and secret management. You will also learn how to deploy Dapr to a Kubernetes (AKS) cluster and how to use Dapr to leverage several Azure services.
DevContainers: Development environments as code
Are you struggling to maintain your development environment setup? Does it take long? If so, come check out devcontainers: full-featured development containers for your dev environment. Get started with a new machine, codebase or project in minutes, not days. Clean up in seconds.
In this session you will learn what devcontainers are, how they work and how to use and create them using clients such as the devcontainer CLI, Visual Studio Code and Rider or CodeSpaces.
We will also cover the specification and how to make them reusable by packaging and publishing devcontainers as templates and features.
Devcontainers are essential to a great developer experience and in this session you learn why and how.
Go (con)figure - making sense of the .NET configuration system
By properly configuring your applications you can make them behave in a flexible manner in different environments. This is an essential enabler to do proper CI/CD while adopting a DevOps way of working. .NET offers a hierarchical configuration system able to layer and structure multiple configuration value providers and dealing with changes during operations. Understanding the specifics of this system will allow you to get the most out of configuring your cloud-based solutions. In this session we will look at the details of the configuration system of .NET Core and beyond and how to incorporate it in various scenarios, such as container hosted .NET applications, from development to production environments. Also, you will learn how to keep your configuration values securely stored using key vaults, container clusters and in pipeline based deployments and releases.
Flagging your features - a DevOps approach to continuous release
Your DevOps team wants to deliver business value as often and fast as possible. Ideally you want to release a new feature whenever it seems ready. With feature flags you can achieve this selective releasing, but how do you do this in a structure and maintainable way that fits well with DevOps practices?
In this session we will look at the implementation of feature flags in cloud native applications, the platform needed to support it and some strategies and patterns related to feature flagging, such as rings and A/B testing. You will learn how to build and maintain this using the Microsoft platform with .NET applications, Azure and Azure DevOps. Also, we will cover how to get feedback from the feature flags and loop it back to the deployment and release pipelines and environments to achieve an automated and stable system during release.
At the end of this session you know how to get started with feature flags for continuous release DevOps style.
Building intuitive command-line interfaces in .NET
The cross-platform story for .NET continues. More and more tooling uses a command-line interface to make it easy to execute complex tasks from a script or console. Microsoft has invested in this area for their own tooling, such as the dotnet CLI or project Tye. You can benefit from their efforts by using System.CommandLine to build your own CLI or parametrize your application startup with arguments and options.
The Microsoft .NET libraries hold a number of great packages to create intuitive CLIs, with commands that have features such as suggestions with tab-completion and typocorrections.
In this session you will learn how to implement commands, with arguments and options, and leverage the build-in functionality such as binding, validation, middle-ware, command-hierarchies, parsing and much more. We are going to cover practical examples and use-cases, plus tips and tricks for efficient development and debugging.
After this session you can are ready to go and build CLIs for your own .NET applications and tooling with minimal effort.
Coding 4 Fun: 8-bit game emulation in .NET
Retro gaming is coming to .NET. Did you know that it is really possible to emulate the game consoles from the eighties and nineties using the .NET Framework and cross-platform? You can use .NET Standard Libraries and MonoGame to develop an emulator to make your childhood computer games come to life on Windows 11, Linux and MacOS. This session will show you how game emulation works, how to program it in C# with Visual Studio 2022 or Visual Studio Code and create apps using MonoGame. With plenty of demos and nostalgia this session is a welcome break even if you do not intend to write an emulator of your own.
I don't feel so well… Integrating health checks in your .NET solutions
Do you have any idea how your ASP.NET Web Apps and APIs are functioning? Are they behaving healthily or in a degraded state? You might be able to tell from log information and telemetry data, but why not have them tell you how healthy they are themselves? ASP.NET Core introduced health endpoints that let your apps and APIs do just that. In this session you will learn how to make health checks an integral part of your solution. We will cover various types of health checks ranging from internal status, such as memory thresholds, to health based on external dependencies, such as databases and HTTP endpoints. Finally, you are going to see how this all can be used in a container cluster to allow the orchestrator to check for liveliness and readiness based on your health endpoints.
Closing the loop: instrumenting your .NET applications with OpenTelemetry
You build it, run it and own it. Knowing how your application behaves is easy in your development environment, because you have better debugging capabilities there. It gets more complicated when you run in production. Getting feedback from your application and learning its behavior is essential to close the DevOps feedback loop.
In this session, you will learn what it takes to instrument your .NET application to get rich feedback in every stage of the lifecycle. We start by looking at the various ways to add logging, tracing, and metrics using the built-in .NET libraries. We will consume the telemetry data from your development environment with OpenTelemetry; no cloud required. Next, we will cover the production scenario and see how you can leverage Azure with Application Insights and Azure Monitor.
By the end of your session, you will have a good understanding how to add proper instrumentation with OpenTelemetry and to put it to good use during your entire development lifecycle.
Cloud aspirations: building cloud-native applications with .NET Aspire
In this workshop we will look at how you can build scalable, robust and observable cloud-native solutions built with .NET 8 and 9 using .NET Aspire. Microsoft has introduced .NET Aspire as an opinionated cloud-ready stack to create distributed application. It addresses cloud-native concerns such as observability, discoverability and composition.
We will start by examining typical distributed applications and their common architecture styles in the cloud, leveraging PaaS services from cloud providers with their resilience and scalability characteristics.
After this overview we will introduce the common concerns for distributed applications, such as observability, service discovery and configuration, and how .NET Aspire can help. You will see how you can build your applications with .NET Aspire, by making proper use of the orchestration, components and tooling it offers. We are also covering the .NET Aspire service discovery and connection management, discover the programming model and the developer workflow.
In the hands-on labs you will experience and practice this yourself. You will enhance an existing application by composing it using the .NET Aspire primitives of projects, containers and cloud resources. With guided exercises you can explore how your application changes with .NET Aspire, the way of working as a developer and DevOps engineer.
Finally, we are going to dive into the inner workings of .NET Aspire and see what happens under the covers during development and in production.
Whether you are maintaining an existing application on premise or are building brand new applications, this workshop will help you understand what .NET aspire can bring to you and how you can apply it in your application context.
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