Pub crawling in Orleans: exploring the Actor model

The Actor model has been around since the seventies, but modern multi-core CPUs and the increasing use of distributed systems have made the Actor model more popular than ever.

Orleans, which is Microsoft's implementation of the (virtual) Actor model, is also getting more attention. Microsoft is aligning Orleans 4 with .NET 7 to provide a simple, performant way to create actor-based distributed systems to developers.

In this demo-heavy session, I'll start by showing you the various features of Orleans, including how they compare to other Actor model implementations. Next you'll learn how we can use those features to create a distributed pub crawl platform that is both easy to maintain and scale. *Beers not included.

Lessons learned analyzing billions of events with Azure Data Explorer

In this session we'll look at a real-world project I did for a company in the energy sector. The customer needed to ingest, analyze (and sometimes correct) billions of incoming telemetry events sent by tens of thousands of electricity and gas meters.

A big part of the solution is built using Azure Data Explorer (ADX). ADX is a fully managed data analytics service for analysis on large volumes of data. ADX not only powers a lot of Azure services, it's also a great service to include in your own solutions.

I'll walk you through some interesting ADX features and show how we've used them in the real-world solution. Next, I’ll explain how we’ve combined ADX with Cosmos DB to give the end users an even better experience by combining the best of the analytical and operational worlds.

Get up to speed with Dapr

Dapr provides a set of powerful building blocks to make our developer lives easier when building distributed applications. With features like service location, state management and pub/sub, Dapr solves common distributed system problems so you can focus on implementing business logic.

In this session, we'll show you how you can leverage the latest Dapr features in real-world scenarios to significantly reduce the complexity involved in building microservices.

Attendees should have a basic understanding of Dapr.

Star Tours: Event Sourcing at Cosmic Scale

Set in the Star Wars universe, Star Tours is a Disney theme park attraction that takes passengers on a turbulent trip across the galaxy. You might have ridden it, but have you ever stopped and thought about the complexity of running such an interplanetary travelling agency?

Event Sourcing can help us tackle this complexity by storing state as a series of events that include the ‘why’ and ‘when’ of the specific event. Cosmos DB, the multi-model globally distributed database service on Azure is a great fit for storing these events.

In this demo-heavy session I'll show you how to build an event store on Cosmos DB starting from scratch. Topics include bulk operations using stored procedures, partitioning strategies, and how to create projections using the Cosmos DB Change Feed. After this session, you’ll be ready to start your own galactic travelling agency!

Let's go on a Blazor adventure!

Blazor is a free and open-source web framework that enables developers to create web apps using C# and HTML. Being a .NET developer as well as a big fan of classic point-and-click adventure games, I’ve ported my Game-a-Tron 4000 adventure game engine to Blazor.

In this session I’ll show you the resulting game and how it was implemented using Blazor. We’ll dive deep into Blazor Components and JavaScript interoperability, all while you can feel nostalgic for the good old days when games came on floppy disks and graphics were pixelated!

Dapr workshop: build microservice applications the easy way

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 session 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 so you can work on this at your own pace. 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.

A perfect match: Dapr & Azure Container Apps

Do you want to run containerized microservice applications with features like autoscaling, HTTPS ingress and traffic routing, but don't want the complexity of the full Kubernetes platform? Or maybe you just don't need the full flexibility that Kubernetes offers and rather trade that in for ease of use. If so, meet Azure Container Apps (ACA): an Azure service that lets you run containerized apps on a serverless platform.

To further ease your life as a developer, ACA includes full support for Dapr, the CNCF project for building portable and reliable microservices.

In this demo-heavy session you’ll learn how to run your microservice apps on ACA while solving common distributed systems problems such as service location, state management and pub/sub with Dapr.

Sander is a Microsoft Azure MVP and author of 'Dapr for .NET Developers' (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/dapr-for-net-developers/). He's the maintainer for the eShopOnDapr reference application (https://github.com/dotnet-architecture/eShopOnDapr) and has worked closely with the ACA team to add ACA support.