Sander Molenkamp

Create real-time web apps on Azure

The new Azure Web PubSub Service is a fully managed service for creating real-time web apps. Servers and clients communicate using the standard WebSockets protocol, and the service can scale to millions of connections.
If this all sounds familiair to you, that's because Azure already provided a real-time web apps service called Azure SignalR service. In this session, we'll look at the differences and similarities of these offerings. I'll explain when to use which service and show various demos.

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.

Advanced Dapr

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 we'll go beyond the basics and deep dive into advanced topics such as securing your Dapr apps for production, integration with other Azure services and extending Dapr by building your own components!

eShop on Dapr: 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 I'll introduce the Dapr building blocks and show how they can be applied to 'eShop on Containers'; a .NET microservices reference application. You'll learn about both the benefits and the limitations of using Dapr in your microservice applications.

Event Sourcing with Azure Cosmos DB

Event Sourcing is nothing more than storing current state as a series of events and rebuilding system state by replaying that series of events. Cosmos DB, the multi-model globally distributed database service on Azure is a great fit for implementing event sourced systems.

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 subscribe to new events using the Cosmos DB Change Feed. All while being globally-distributed, and without deploying or managing any servers.

This session is based on a more general Event Store & CQRS on Azure session, but focusses on Cosmos DB and includes more demos. The more general session has previously been presented at Prague Update Conference and DevSum 2019.

Serverless web apps with Blazor and Azure Functions

Client-side Blazor now allows developers to write .NET applications which run in the user’s browser. Combine this with Azure Functions, and you’ve got a cost-effective, highly scalable architecture for serverless web apps.

In this session Sander will show how he built Serverless Ponies, a game designed by his 8 year old daughter, combining their respective interests of Azure architecture and cute ponies. The talk will cover the implementation of the front-end using Blazor and JavaScript interop to re-use existing libraries, as well as the back-end implementation using the latest Azure Durable Functions 2.0 features.

By the end of the talk, you will be ready to start building your own modern serverless web apps.

How to build resilient applications in Microsoft Azure

We all want to write systems that stay responsive in the face of failure. But building a reliable application in the cloud is quite different from building a reliable application in a traditional enterprise setting. The nature of cloud hosting, where applications run scaled-out on commodity hardware means failure is not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’. This session will show you many principles and patterns for surviving these failures in the Azure cloud, so your users can enjoy an uninterrupted experience.

Building serverless microservice applications on Azure

In this session we’ll look at the various aspects of building a modern, serverless microservice application on the Azure platform. We’ll start with a sample solution consisting of various back-end microservices combined with a Blazor front-end. We’ll discuss the challenges of building microservice applications and show how the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) can make your live easier.

In the second part of the session we’ll deploy the application to Azure and run it using Azure Container Apps, a new Azure service for running serverless containers. We’ll discuss the various features of Azure Container Apps and show how it integrates with Dapr.