Isaac Levin
Developer Advocate
Woodinville, Washington, United States
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Isaac Levin is a Developer Advocate at Sonar as well as a Microsoft MVP. He has over 10 years of experience working as a developer for the web, mostly in the Microsoft Ecosystem. Outside of work, he hosts a podcast called Coffee and Open Source where he interviews folks from across the tech industry as well as builds open-source projects like PresenceLight and GitHub Stat Tracker. He lives outside of Seattle Washington and likes to wind down from work with his wife Ariana and his 2 children Isaac and Avery.
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The Art of Falling Face Up: Building Resilience and Embracing Change
Change is a constant in our lives, and it can be both exhilarating and unsettling. Whether we are facing changes in our personal or professional lives, how we react to them can determine our success and happiness. In this talk, we'll explore the concept of resilience and how it can help us embrace change and thrive in the face of adversity.
We'll examine the traits and skills that enable us to develop resilience, including emotional intelligence, flexibility, and problem-solving. We'll also discuss the importance of embracing change and the opportunities it can present, even in the most difficult of circumstances.
Throughout the talk, we'll share stories of individuals who have overcome adversity and embraced change, highlighting the common themes and strategies that have enabled them to persevere and succeed.
By the end of this talk, you'll come away with a deeper understanding of how to build resilience and embrace change in your own life. You'll learn practical strategies for building emotional intelligence and problem-solving skills, and how to leverage change as an opportunity for growth and personal development. Whether you're facing a significant life transition or simply looking to build your resilience, this talk will inspire and equip you to "fall face up" and thrive in the face of change.
Is Aspire Actually Worth It? A Skeptic’s Guide to the New Cloud-Native Stack
Setting up a new developer on a distributed .NET project is usually a day-long saga of "Did you install Redis?" and "Check your environment variables." Aspire promises to fix that, but how does it actually feel to use day-to-day?
I’ve been experimenting with Aspire to see if it can truly simplify the local development experience for multi-service apps. This talk is a practical tour of my findings, focusing on the developer "inner loop."
What we'll cover:
- Orchestration without the Headache: How to use the AppHost to wire up services, databases, and caches without touching a single YAML file.
- Observability on Day One: Using the Aspire dashboard to actually see what’s happening between your services during local debugging.
- The Deployment Question: How Aspire-orchestrated apps can still be deployed to your existing infrastructure (even if you aren't ready for "Cloud Native" yet).
- What I Wish I Knew: The things that aren't in the documentation that will save you hours of troubleshooting.
Stop fighting your local environment and start shipping code. Let’s see if Aspire is the tool that finally makes distributed development feel "local" again.
Copilot, Cursor, and Custom LLMs: Navigating the New .NET Developer Experience
It feels like every two weeks there’s a new "game-changing" AI tool that promises to write our code for us. But for those of us working in the .NET ecosystem, the reality is a bit messier. We’re caught between the tools we know (Visual Studio), the new AI-native editors everyone is talking about (Cursor), and the reality that public LLMs often struggle with our internal business logic and private libraries.
I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out where the "productivity" ends and the "hype" begins. In this session, we’re skipping the "Hello World" demos and getting into the actual friction of the new .NET developer loop.
We’ll look at:
The Tooling Split: When should you stick with the deep integration of Copilot in Visual Studio, and when is it actually worth switching to Cursor for its "Composer" features?
Context is Everything: How to stop the "hallucinations" by giving these tools better context of your specific .NET solution, including using local LLMs for the stuff you can’t send to the cloud.
The "Senior Dev" Reality Check: How our roles are changing from just writing lines of C# to auditing AI-generated PRs and managing "agentic" workflows without breaking the build.
This isn't a sales pitch for any specific tool. It’s a practical look at how to build a modern .NET development environment that actually helps you ship faster, rather than just adding another subscription to your credit card.
What you’ll learn:
A side-by-side look at Copilot vs. Cursor on a real C# codebase.
How to use RAG and local models (like Ollama) to talk to your own docs and legacy code.
Practical tips for "Context Engineering" to get better C# refactoring results.
Short Links, Big Impact: Automating Social Distribution with .NET and GenAI
We’ve all built a link shortener to learn a new language, but in the age of GenAI and Cloud-native orchestration, a simple redirect isn't enough. What if your link shortener didn't just shorten a URL, but understood its content, crafted a tailored social media campaign, and scheduled the posts automatically?
In this session, we take the classic "Link Shortener" project and supercharge it using the modern .NET stack. We will walk through the journey of building a Social Distribution Engine, a project that serves as the perfect playground for mastering Aspire, Azure OpenAI, and background service orchestration.
We’ll dive deep into the technical architecture, including:
The Intelligent Pipeline: Using Azure OpenAI to scrape destination content, summarize key takeaways, and generate platform-specific social media copy (X, LinkedIn, Mastodon).
Cloud-Native Orchestration: How Aspire simplifies the "wiring" of our web frontend, Redis cache, and background worker services without a single manual connection string.
Scheduled Execution: Implementing reliable background processing to handle rate-limiting and auto-scheduling for social API broadcasts.
Observability by Default: Leveraging the Aspire dashboard to trace an incoming link through the AI generation process to a successful social post.
This isn't just a "how-to" on link shortening; it’s a masterclass in using .NET to build integrated, AI-driven workflows that solve real-world productivity gaps.
The Augmented Architect: Maintaining Your Voice in the Age of AI Content
We’ve all seen "AI Slop", like technical blog posts and documentation that look correct at a glance but are hollow, generic, or subtly wrong. As developers, we are being pushed to use LLMs to speed up our writing, but the real challenge isn't generation; it’s curation. How do you use AI to draft your READMEs, RFCs, and blog posts without sacrificing your technical authority?
In this session, we’ll move past the "Can AI write a talk?" gimmick and look at the actual workflow of a "Human-in-the-loop" creator.
We will explore:
- The Context Gap: Why AI fails at technical nuance and how to feed it the right "Architectural Context" to get meaningful drafts.
- The Editing Rubric: A 3-step framework for auditing AI-generated technical content to ensure it actually reflects your intent.
- The Ethics of Efficiency: When is it "cheating" to use AI for documentation, and when is it just being a productive engineer?
- Case Studies: Real examples of documentation and conference proposals—some human, some hybrid—and a breakdown of why the "hybrid" approach usually wins.
Stop using AI as a ghostwriter and start using it as a high-powered editor that still sounds like you.
Evaluating AI Developer Tools: A Practical Comparison
This session provides a direct comparison of several AI-assisted developer tools including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Loveable, and others. Each tool will be tested against a consistent set of programming tasks such as writing new code, refactoring, debugging, and test generation.
Attendees will see how each tool performs in terms of accuracy, speed, and integration with existing workflows. The session will highlight specific strengths and limitations based on real coding scenarios. It will also cover what happens when multiple tools are used together.
This talk is intended for developers who want a practical understanding of how current AI tools support day-to-day programming work and where manual effort is still required.
Trust No Code: Securing Modern .NET Apps in the Age of AI
Modern .NET development is a race for velocity. We are writing less "original" code than ever, instead relying on a massive ecosystem of NuGet packages and the siren song of AI-generated snippets from GitHub Copilot. But this speed comes with a hidden tax: a massive expansion of your attack surface. If you didn't write every line of code in your assembly, how can you truly trust it?
This session is a practical, demo-heavy guide for .NET developers who want to take ownership of security without slowing down. We will move beyond theory to dissect the three primary vectors of modern code risk: vulnerable dependencies, "hallucinated" security flaws in AI suggestions, and systemic configuration gaps.
You will leave this session with a battle-tested playbook for "Shifting Left." We’ll explore how to automate Software Composition Analysis (SCA) directly in the CLI, how to treat AI as a "junior dev" with a code review framework, and how to implement Static Application Security Testing (SAST) quality gates that stop vulnerabilities before they hit your main branch. Stop being a passive consumer of code and start being a security champion.
Beyond Logger.Debug: Instrumenting Agentic Workflows with .NET and App Insights
Adding an LLM to your .NET application is easy. Understanding why it failed in production at 3:00 AM is not. Traditional application monitoring focuses on HTTP status codes and CPU spikes, but AI-enhanced applications introduce a new set of failures: semantic drift, "hallucination" timeouts, and runaway agent loops.
In this session, we’ll look at how to evolve your application’s instrumentation to keep pace with modern AI features. We will move past the basics of Azure Monitor and explore how to use Application Insights and OpenTelemetry to get a clear view of how your .NET code is actually interacting with intelligent models.
What we will cover at the Application Layer:
Tracing the Thought Process: Using Custom Spans to visualize "multi-turn" agent reasoning in the App Insights Transaction Timeline—so you can see exactly where an agent lost the plot.
Semantic Logging: Moving beyond strings to log "Semantic Metadata." Learn how to capture prompt versions, token usage, and "grounding scores" as custom properties on your telemetry.
Dependency Analysis for AI: How to treat LLM calls as external dependencies with specific "Success" criteria that aren't just "200 OK."
The Copilot for Your Logs: Using the new AI-driven query capabilities in Azure to ask your logs questions like, "Why did users start getting frustrated with the chatbot after the last deployment?"
If you are shipping AI features without specific application-level monitoring, you are flying blind. Join us to learn how to build apps that are as observable as they are intelligent.
Still on 4.8 or lower? A Practical Guide to Moving Your "Un-Migratable" .NET Apps
Let’s be honest: if your .NET Framework app was easy to migrate, you would have done it three years ago. You’re likely stuck with legacy WCF services, deep dependencies on System.Web, or a NuGet graph that looks like a bowl of yarn. The .NET Upgrade Assistant is a great start, but it’s the last 20% of the migration—the part that the tools can’t automate—that actually keeps us up at night.
In this session, we’re moving past the "hello world" migration demos. We’ll look at real strategies for modernizing .NET Framework 4.x apps into .NET 8/9/10 without a complete rewrite.
We will get into the weeds on:
The "Bridge" Strategy: Using YARP (Yet Another Reverse Proxy) to migrate your app piece-by-piece rather than a "Big Bang" release.
The Dependency Trap: What to do when your critical library hasn't been updated since 2014.
Modernizing the "Un-modernizable": Strategies for dealing with legacy config systems and static state that modern .NET hates.
This isn't a theoretical talk about "embracing innovation." It’s a tactical session for developers who need to get their legacy code onto a supported, performant, and AI-ready platform without breaking the business.
Building .NET Web Applications Through the Ages
Over two decades, .NET has transformed how developers build web applications, evolving from Web Forms to modern frameworks like Blazor. This session provides a concise overview of key milestones, architectural shifts, and innovations in the .NET ecosystem. From the introduction of ASP.NET MVC and the rise of .NET Core to the seamless integration of cloud services, you'll gain insights into the tools and trends that have shaped .NET's trajectory. Whether you're a seasoned developer or new to .NET, this session offers a clear perspective on where we've been and where we're headed.
A Little Bit of Everything – The Latest in ASP.NET Core
In this workshop, we will explore the evolving landscape of web development and how ASP.NET Core is poised to revolutionize the way we build modern web applications.
We will walk through a comprehensive journey that covers a diverse range of topics, including:
ASP.NET Core Overview: Gain an understanding of the latest version of ASP.NET Core and its role in the web development ecosystem.
API Development: Learn how to create robust APIs with ASP.NET Core and leverage the latest features for building RESTful services.
Data Access and Entity Framework Core: Understand how to work with data effectively using Entity Framework Core and the improvements introduced in ASP.NET Core.
Blazor Enhancements: Dive into the latest advancements in Blazor, the web framework for building interactive web applications, and see how it can be seamlessly integrated with ASP.NET Core.
Security and Identity: Learn about the enhanced security features and best practices for securing your ASP.NET Core applications, including authentication and authorization.
Containerization and Microservices: Explore how ASP.NET Core embraces containerization and microservices architecture, enabling you to build modular and scalable applications.
Whether you're an experienced ASP.NET developer or just getting started in web development, this workshop offers a diverse and comprehensive overview of ASP.NET Core, equipping you with the knowledge and skills to build powerful, secure, and high-performance web applications.
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