The Call for Presentations for Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas 2026 is now OPEN.

Proposals are due: Monday, July 28, 2025, 11:59 PST

Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas - March 16 – 20, 2026

-  Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino, Las Vegas, NV

Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas 2026 will offer a combination of in-depth and interactive sessions including workshops, hands-on labs, 75-minute breakouts, and 20-minute fast focuses. We invite you to submit sessions in any and all of these categories, and you may also submit across multiple topic areas at a single show.

To help you in creating successful submissions, we want to share some of the considerations that go into our process of selecting our speakers and sessions for a Visual Studio Live! event. First, each speaker will typically be selected to deliver two presentations. That means that it is in your best interest to submit at least three topics, especially if you are submitting overview or introductory topics that many other speakers are likely to also submit. Next, please make sure that your title is clear and appropriate to the track you are submitting it to, and that your description includes enough detail to understand what audience members will walk away from your session having learned. Again, many speakers often provide submissions on the same topics, meaning it comes down to a meaningful title, a quality abstract, and compelling takeaways for our participants. Following these guidelines ensures that the conference chairs do not have to eliminate fantastic speakers from the selection process because they only have 1 talk that is selectable for a given show.

Wanting to dig in even deeper and offer hands on experience and learning? We are also looking for speakers willing to deliver two-day workshops and two-day hands-on labs that will be offered as part of the 2026 VSLive! Virtual Training Course series.

Session, workshop, and hands-on lab proposals are welcome in the following topic areas:

Session proposals are welcome in the following topic areas: 

Modern Software Engineering

• Key Pillars of DevOps (automation, collaboration, customer centricity, etc.)
• Agentic DevOps
• DevSecOps and other XXXOps enhancements
• Operations for developers (on premises and cloud)
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Platform Engineering
• Observability benefits, strategies, and tooling
• Monitoring benefits, strategies, and tooling
• Azure DevOps Services
• Azure DevOps Server (latest release)
• Azure DevOps and GitHub integration
• GitHub Enterprise Cloud
• GitHub Enterprise Server
• GitHub Advanced Security
• GitHub Codespaces
• GitHub Copilot
• Other AI assistant tools like Cursor, Cody, Meta Llama, etc.
• Microsoft DevOps Tooling (version control, agile planning, build, release, monitoring)
• DevOps Features in Visual Studio Enterprise (CodeLens, Profilers, IntelliTrace)
• Online services outside of Microsoft (e.g. GitLab, AWS, etc.)
• Release Tooling (Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Chef, Puppet, Octopus Deploy)
• Secure pipeline tooling and management
• Component management and attestation
• Visual Studio tooling that facilitates Agile Software Development Practices (Scrum / XP / Lean)
• Leading practices in test development, execution strategy, environment management, and automation
• Developer “inner-loop” optimization (workstation configuration, using containers, shells, etc.)
• Customizing your team development environment
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka “Bash on Windows”)
• Application Analytics (OpenTelemetry, App Insights, New Relic, etc.)
• Migrating from a non-Microsoft platform to an Azure DevOps Server/Services environment
• Development, Quality, and Security leading practices
• Asynchronous development techniques

Cloud Computing

• Includes cloud, server, and messaging technologies
• .NET Aspire
• CNCF tools, libraries, and frameworks such as dapr
• Container technology like containerd, Docker, podman, Kubernetes, Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), Azure Container Apps (ACA), and Azure Container Registry (ACR)
• Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud
• Microsoft Azure new features and Marketplace offerings
• Microservices architecture, design, and implementation
• Serverless computing (Azure Functions, Amazon Lambda)
• Azure Logic Apps, Power Automate, PowerApps
• Low code/no code, including Power Platform and SharePoint
• Web API design
• WebAssembly outside the browser (e.g. WASI, component model, rustlet)
• Services in general (REST, queuing, gRPC, etc.)
• Hosting non-Microsoft platforms in Azure (Java, NodeJS, Python, etc.)

Database and Analytics

• Entity Framework
• Integrating “legacy” data to modern applications
• SQL Server 2025, including SQL Server on Linux and containers
• Azure SQL Database, including Serverless and Hyperscale, Azure SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI), and Azure SQL Edge
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB
• Microsoft BI, including Power BI, Power BI Premium, Microsoft Fabric, SQL Server Analysis Services and Azure Analysis Services
• Big Data/Data Lake/Lakehouse, including Microsoft Fabric Data Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Eventhouse and Data Engineering, Azure Synapse Analytics, HDInsight, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Explorer and Azure Data Lake Storage
• Data Management, including Microsoft Purview, Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Fabric Data Factory (pipelines and Dataflows Gen2), SQL Server Integration Services
• NoSQL, including Cosmos DB, Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra
• IoT and streaming analytics (including Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, Azure IoT Hub; Azure Event Hubs; Azure Stream Analytics; Spark Streaming on Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics)
• Data tooling, including SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), and Visual Studio Code (with add-ins)

Cutting Edge AI

• Agentic AI development, with Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Foundry SDK, Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, Microsoft Copilot Studio, AI Toolkit for VS Code, Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit, and Microsoft 365 Agents SDK
• RAG application development tools and techniques, vector embeddings and search, and vector database capabilities in Azure AI Search, Cosmos DB and SQL Server
• Azure AI, including Azure OpenAI, Azure Machine Learning and Azure AI Services
• Microsoft Copilot technologies and development, including Copilot Studio, building Copilot plug-ins, or using copilots in dev tools
• OpenAI services and APIs
• Anthropic services and APIs
• Google services and APIs
• Generative AI tooling, including prompt flow, Semantic Kernel, Azure OpenAI Studio, Azure AI Foundry and Responsible AI Dashboard
• AI in Power Apps and in-application AI on Windows
• Developing for Copilot+ PCs, Phi-2, Small Language Models, and model fine-tuning
• Machine Learning (ML), including Azure Machine Learning; Azure AutoML; Microsoft Fabric Data Science and FLAML; ML/AI on Azure Databricks; ML.NET
• Data Science, including R and Python (standalone, in Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse Analytics, in SQL Server, in Azure SQL Managed Instance, in Power BI, on HDInsight and/or on Azure Databricks)
• MLOps and model monitoring, including MLflow on Databricks and in Microsoft Fabric

New Experiences - Mobile, Desktop, and Native Clients

• Blazor native and hybrid app developmentUpgrading / Migrating Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI
• Flutter, Uno Platform, Avalonia, and similar products
• .NET MAUI for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac
• Upgrading / Migrating Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI
• iOS, and Android native development (Swift, Java, Kotlin)
• Voice, text, and other bot experiences
• Mobile web and responsive web design
• WinUI, WPF and Windows Forms applications with .NET 10
• Design Principles (UI, UX, Interaction)

Human Factors in Engineering

• Recognizing burnout in yourself or your team and taking appropriate action
• Recognizing confidence killers like Imposter Syndrome and building back your confidence to ensure success
• Psychological safety and trust, why it matters, and how to build a psychologically safe environment with your team
• Effective communication for negotiating and collaborating with team members, stakeholders, and clients, including interpersonal communication, active listening, and public speaking
• Techniques for working well within a team like self-awareness, effective sharing of ideas, and providing constructive feedback essential for successful software projects
• Adaptability for being flexible and open to change, whether it's new technologies, project requirements, or team dynamics
• Prioritization and time management to meet deadlines and deliver quality work
• Team communication/collaboration tools (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Azure DevOps boards, etc.)
• Tools and techniques for facilitating events/meetings/ceremonies
• Tech leadership skills for inspiring and guiding team members, even if you're not in a formal leadership role
• Creative problem solving to delight end users, satisfy client needs in helpful ways, and stay relevant in today’s dynamically changing tech environment
• Value Stream Mapping - what, why, and how
• Customer experience strategies, tools, and leading practices
• Metrics, OKRs, and goal setting for individuals and teams
• Teaming effectively in an increasingly remote and asynchronous world
• High-quality code review outcomes and experiences
• Mentorship programs, including benefits, and strategies for impact and scale
• Leveraging AI tools and solutions to boost the non-technical aspects of your career
• Technologist career paths and career development strategies
• Product delivery processes and frameworks (agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, etc.)
• Lean and agile testing practices
• Delivering effectively at scale

Visual Studio / .NET

• Visual Studio productivity
• Visual Studio Code and extensions
• .NET 10
• Cross platform .NET for Linux, Windows, Mac, and others
• New C# language features
• Advanced .NET, such as building analyzers and .NET code generation
• Deep dive topics such as Dependency Injection, threading, performance optimization, and memory usage
• Instrumentation, logging, tracing, and OpenTelemetry
• Maker / Hobby / Games

Web Client

• Blazor (server-side, client-side, and .NET 10 capabilities)
• Angular, React, Vue, and other JavaScript UI frameworks
• WebAssembly, including .NET, Go, Rust, and others
• Progressive Web Apps
• ECMAScript/JavaScript
• TypeScript
• node.js and other server-side frameworks
• CSS and related tooling and frameworks

Web Server

• ASP.NET Core Features
• ASP.NET Razor Pages
• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Web API
• Visual Studio Web developer tooling (built-in, add-ons, testing)

Submission Guidelines  

Please include the following information with your submission (failure to supply all requested information may limit opportunities for selection):

• Speaker's Name
• Speaker's Title
• Speaker's Company
• Title of Presentation
• 100-word Description of Presentation
• 3-5 Bullets, explaining what the attendee will learn from presentation (learning objectives)
• Speaker's Color Photo (hi-resolution)
• Speaker's Bio, including previous conference speaking/presentation experience

Speakers chosen to present at a Visual Studio Live! conference will receive a stipend for each session they present. Visual Studio Live! Conferences will also cover hotel accommodations (room and tax only) for a pre-determined number of nights at the host hotel as outlined in the speaker agreement. Speakers are responsible for their own travel costs and incidentals.

We look forward to your submissions. 

~ The Visual Studio Live! Event Team