Learn how ASP.NET Core in makes it easier to build secure AI infused web apps with the latest AI libraries and security standards, like WebAuthn & Passkey support. See how you can more easily monitor and diagnose issues with improved diagnostics and telemetry and boost developer productivity with .NET Aspire. We will also take a look into the future of Blazor for building web apps, Minimal API validation, OpenAPI generations, and more.-

Talk (60 min)

The Future of Web Development with ASP.NET Core & Blazor in .NET 10

.NET

Microsoft

In this session, you will:
- Explore the core pillars of the WAF—Security, Reliability, Cost, Performance, and Operational Excellence—and understand how to apply them at scale.
- Examine fail-mode scenarios and service-level agreements (SLAs) to strengthen system resilience and clarify trade-offs in cloud design.
- Learn how to validate and test architecture using proven Azure tools and methodologies.
- Discover best practices for optimizing Azure services to meet both technical requirements and business goals.

Attendees will leave with a practical roadmap for creating cloud solutions that not only address present needs but also pave the way for enduring innovation and sustainability.

The Well-Architected Architect - Building Secure, Reliable, Cost-efficient Solutions on Azure

Azure

Architecture

Cloud

DevOps

Security

However, these aren’t new problems, and smart people have already created solutions for them. Solutions like the Actor pattern, which solves the problem by using in-memory “actors” to make life simpler. Unfortunately, the Actor pattern introduces another set of challenges. Things like instance proxying, state management, clustering, actor distribution and so on. Topics that most of us don’t feel like solving on our own. Luckily, Microsoft has already built all of this for us, in something they call Project Orleans.

Why not join Chris Klug, as he explains how Project Orleans can help you to solve scenarios like the ones described above. It might be worth noting though, that if you like slide heavy presentations with lots of theory and little practice, you should probably stay away. This session uses lots of demos to show you the practicalities of getting started building solutions using Project Orleans, and the features is offers. So please come well rested, and ready for a lot of coding.


Introduction to Actor-based Development with Project Orleans

Microservices

In this down-to-earth conference talk, we’ll take a closer look at the nuts and bolts of Buienradar’s operations. Discover how Buienradar’s scalable infrastructure and clever algorithms work together to process vast amounts of data, providing users with reliable weather forecasts at their fingertips.

We’ll explore the challenges of managing such a high volume of users and data, discussing practical solutions and lessons learned along the way. From data handling techniques to performance optimization, we’ll cover it all in a relatable and accessible manner.

We will cover our journey to kubernetes, how our platform engineering works, how our architecture looks like, how we maximize our observability using grafana and much more.

Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a weather aficionado, or simply curious about how your favorite weather app works, this talk is for you. Join us as we peel back the curtain on Buienradar’s technology, demystifying the complex world of weather forecasting in a way that’s easy to understand and appreciate.

The tech behind weather forecasting: How technology keeps you ahead of the weather

In this session we'll walk through the incident and our journey from being alerted and the initial panic, through collaborative firefighting, to methodical investigation and finally resolution. On the way we'll talk about the importance of telemetry, teamwork, and not placing too much trust in your service provider.

In the end the issue was resolved. Our team learned a lot that day about how we handle incidents and learn from what happened. I hope you'll leave the session thinking about how your team can take what happened to us and make sure you can handle your own incidents effectively.


When good services go bad: An Azure murder mystery

In this demo-oriented session, you will learn how pragmatic testing, especially within the versatile Azure ecosystem, can evolve from a cumbersome task into an efficiency-enhancing practice.

I will focus on the aspect of testing for end-to-end applications deployed on Microsoft Azure. The focus will be on dissecting and mastering three critical facets of application testing: Unit Tests, Integration Tests, and Front-End Tests.

I will leverage SpecFlow, Xunit, Playwright and Azure Load Testing and demonstrate their value and how they can be integrated in your software release pipelines.

Azure Assured: pragmatic Azure testing

Testing

Teams are being asked to move faster and faster as well as be able to change direction quickly as customer needs change. And what happens when a product hits success and needs to scale, fast! Do these architectures make it easy for apps to scale and new developers to get up to speed and be productive quickly?

Essentially, do these architectures allow teams to build for change? The one constant in our industry.

In this talk, we’re going to look at an alternative way to build applications using vertical slice architecture (VSA). You’ll learn what VSA is and how it differs from the layered approach. We’ll cover it’s key advantages and how it can help you, or your teams, build better software, faster. We’ll also talk about some common misconceptions of the architecture as well as trade-offs when choosing it.

Designing for change with Vertical Slice Architecture

A sample application is shown running in Azure App Service that is connected to data sources like Azure Storage and Azure SQL Database. Private endpoints, Azure Front Door, Azure Key Vault and various other services are also used. At the end of the presentation, cheaper and more practical options are also shown. The sample application source code and other files will made available to the audience.

Seriously securing an Azure PaaS application

We’ll cover practical techniques to uncover the reasons behind slow queries and fix them. Along the way, we’ll look at new features and insights that make performance tuning more straightforward.

>> Finding Bottlenecks with Wait Statistics: Learn how to spot the root cause of delays in your queries.
>> Session-Level Wait Stats: See how tracking waits at the session level can provide valuable insights.
>> Understanding CPU Waits: Break down CPU-related waits and what they mean for your server’s performance.
>> Fixing Disk I/O Delays: Understand how to reduce the impact of disk waits on your queries.
>> Using Wait Stats to Tune Queries: Apply what you learn to improve indexes, joins, and query plans.

This session is for anyone who wants to improve query performance and make their SQL Server run as efficiently as possible. Join us to learn simple, actionable steps that you can start using right away.

"Run Query Run" - A Fresh Look at SQL Wait Stats

Database

In this session, I will guide you through the implementation of an existing quantum algorithm, step by step, while I explain all the details. This will be a very technical and code-heavy session.

Creating a quantum algorithm using Microsoft Q#

Programming Languages

In this session, we will introduce Kafka, explaining the concepts of records, offsets, SerDes, schema registries, in-sync replicas, and partitions. There will be code, as we work with examples in .NET, using it as a messaging solution in your applications. By the end of this session, you should feel comfortable with the concepts required to use Kafka as a .NET developer.

Kafka for .NET Developers

This session dives deep into modern authorization patterns in .NET, helping you move beyond if(user.IsInRole()) to scalable, flexible, and secure designs using fine-grained authorization patterns.

The session will cover:
- The built-in authorization model in ASP.NET Core, including policies, roles, and claims
- Attribute-based vs. resource-based authorization
- Custom policy and handler development
- Managing fine-grained permissions across microservices and APIs
- Externalizing authorization decisions using centralized authorization systems
- Best practices for combining authentication (OIDC / OAuth2) with robust authorization logic
- Common pitfalls—like hardcoding roles or overloading claims—and how to avoid them

This session will equip you with the patterns and practices to build secure, testable, and future-proof authorization in .NET.

Getting Authorization Right in .NET: Patterns, Pitfalls, and Practical Guidance

Like many developers, I embodied the classic stereotype: Developers don’t do sports. I’ve been nerdy and, let’s face it, a little bit overweight my entire life. My first memories of sport participation involve being picked last for the team and ridiculed for trying.

But when I discovered the strength sport of powerlifting that all changed. What started as a casual pursuit of a niche sport quickly became a large and important part of my life.

In this talk, I’ll share with you
- Why individual pursuits still require teamwork
- Why enjoying the process is half the battle in reaching the desired outcome (and some strategies to achieve that)
- Why facing your fears often and in small doses leads to unmatched levels of badassery that will have you confronting challenges head on

Attendees will leave this talk not only with concrete actions they can bring to their life and work, but also inspired to try something new.

How Powerlifting Made Me a Better Software Engineer

People

Soft Skills

We'll start with a focused deep dive into Playwright itself: modern locators, resilient test patterns, parallelization, and debugging features that help teams test faster and smarter. Then we'll explore how to connect the Playwright MCP Server to an LLM, allowing you to:
- Automatically generate meaningful tests from user flows or requirements
- Identify gaps in test coverage
- Debug and repair failing or flaky tests
- Interact with your running application via natural language

This talk is ideal for developers, testers, and QA engineers who want to level up their automation stack, reduce test maintenance, and bring AI into real-world testing workflows. Expect live demos and practical strategies you can take back to your team.

Supercharged Testing: AI-Powered Workflows with Playwright + MCP

Tooling

In this session, we’ll talk about how to build strong and flexible integrations using Azure’s messaging tools: Service Bus, Event Grid and Event Hubs. We’ll see real-life scenarios where async messaging saved the day — and a few where things went things went sideways.

At the end, it will be clear when to use each tool, retry good practices, how to monitor everything to know when something goes wrong. If you're building anything that talks to anything else, this session will give you tips, tolos and real-world recipes for building systems that don’t crumble.

Integration à la carte: a chef’s guide to asynchronous messaging in Azure

At Build 2025, Microsoft released a new .NET abstraction to the world: Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData allows interacting with a wide array of vector databases, and includes advanced developer productivity features not yet seen in other languages. 

Join one of the creators of ME.VectorData for a discussion of vector databases, the new .NET abstraction, and the ideas and considerations that went into its design.

Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData - a new .NET vector database abstraction for AI apps

GenAI

Come and join us for a rollercoaster ride in the Roslyn compiler source code, implementing a small language features in 60 minutes, starting from "git clone", building Roslyn, implementing our feature, compiling the compiler, and finally compiling a little snippet of code using our new language feature using our custom compiler build. During this talk, we'll encounter syntax trees, semantic analysis, bound trees, and more.

Adding a new Language Feature to C# in 60 minutes

See how GitHub Copilot is being reimagined through this entire lifecycle to boost productivity across teams.

Reimagining Software Development and DevOps with Agentic AI

We'll dive into agentic workflows alongside vibe coding and spec-driven development, showcasing a streamlined process that helps you plan, code, and iterate more efficiently without added complexity.

AI Coding Evolved - GitHub Copilot Tips, Tricks, & Spec-Driven Flows

In this time-defying and luck-tempting presentation, join ASP.NET Core developer Safia as she implements a minimal APIs-like framework in .NET from first principles live on-stage. Attendees can expect to leave this session with an understanding of framework fundamentals and insights into how framework implementers make decisions about application design.

Building minimal APIs from scratch

Whether you're building greenfield apps or modernizing existing workloads, you'll leave with actionable insights, demos, and field-tested best practices to:

- Use AI prompts to generate real infrastructure and code
- Automate Azure deployment and configuration
- Debug and optimize using intelligent diagnostics
- Improve team velocity with integrated DevOps flows

This session is perfect for developers looking to boost productivity, reduce complexity, and make the most of Microsoft's latest AI innovations across the developer toolchain.

From Prompt to Production: Accelerate Azure App Development with Copilot, VS Code & AI

You’ll also get a first look at single service deployment for .NET Aspire: push the entire solution when you’re ready or just the new microservice you’re iterating on. Join us to explore these capabilities, pick up practical guidance straight from the team, and leave ready to deliver features with confidence and speed.

Harness the Power of Azure with Visual Studio

In this session, we’ll demonstrate how AKS Migrate simplifies the modernization journey, helping you move from VMs to containers with confidence. Whether you're tackling a single app or a portfolio of services, AKS Migrate accelerates your path to Kubernetes on Azure.

Modernize with Ease – Introducing AKS Migrate

It’s a dev-first toolkit that spins up your entire app—frontend, backend, and dependencies—with a built-in dashboard for logs, health checks, and traces. And if you aren't already using Open Telemetry, Aspire knows how to turn it on for your whole stack.
No replatforming, no YAML, and no cloud required. Just "aspire run" to start everything from your frontend to your custom containers - no matter the language.
Come see how Aspire streamlines your stack and bring sanity back to local development.

Introducing Aspire - a dev-first toolkit for your entire stack

That's right, no one likes applications crashing or giving users an unexpected behavior.

Introducing asynchronous patterns is so much more than just applying async and await to your methods; you really, I mean really, need to understand what's going on.

In this session, we'll make sure you know how to avoid crashing your applications, and how to adhere to best practices when applying asynchronous patterns in our .NET applications.

Back to Basics: Efficient Async and Await

You can learn the basics of HTMX within a few minutes, and start using its rich collection of features to build any UI experience - usually a few HTML attributes are enough. And thanks to ASP.NET Core Tag Helpers, even those become easier to work with.

In this session, we'll look at how you can get started with HTMX, explore some of its concepts, and look at some common scenarios like typeahead search, server-side modal dialogs, input validation, polling, and more. You'll walk a way with a new appreciation for the maturity of ASP.NET Core, and the simplicity of HTMX.

HTMX and ASP.NET Core - I don’t know how to React

I will share the journey of building a personal version of the Duckling Droid, breaking down the core concepts and technical processes involved. Through a live demonstration of the robot’s unique behaviors, attendees will gain insight into how AI and robotics can work harmoniously to achieve advanced functionality and lifelike traits.

Through this session, you will:
- learn about Azure AI Studio & Azure Custom Vision
- learn how to easily prepare and tag images for model training,
- see how to train a model for object detection,
- analyse images from the camera of the robot,
- control motor and other IoT devices connected to the robot,
- and much more.

This session is designed to inspire and educate AI practitioners, robotics enthusiasts, and curious minds alike. Whether you're new to the field or looking to expand your knowledge, you'll leave with a deeper appreciation of the tools and techniques shaping the future of robotics.

From Curiosity to Creation: AI & Robotics for Real-World Interaction

Machine Learning

.NET Aspire for Frontend Apps

Mobile

So many forces shape how development tools are created, and Richard ties together the story of the hardware, software, market and political forces that have brought .NET to be an open-source, cross-platform development platform. The winding path of .NET has been influenced by many things along the way, and the future looks bright!

The History of .NET

In this session, we'll look at the Cloud Adoption Framework and how you can use it effectively. I will take your through each step of the Framework and the challenges that came with them in the real world implementations. Spoiler alert: It’s often not the technology that’s the problem! By the end of this talk you will have actionable knowledge to shape your own Azure journey to its fullest potential.

The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework: What the Docs don’t tell you

In this talk, I’ll share experiences of moving existing, live systems to Azure, with zero data loss and minimum to zero downtime. I’ll walk through analyzing existing applications and infrastructure, and how to decide whether to re-platform for PaaS or simply lift-and-shift.

We’ll also look at build and deployment scenarios to make sure we don’t have to stop all new development for our cloud migration. Finally, we’ll walk through a real-world, on-premise system and migrate it to Azure, live!

Tales from the Azure Migration Trenches

In this talk, allow me to indulge you with the story of my many failed—and successful—attempts at architecting software products using a cacophony of Azure services released over the past decade, and why my next architecture must, once again, reflect the signs of the times.

Hard lessons learned from a decade of architecting software products on Azure

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.

DevContainers for Azure cloud platform engineers

You’ll learn:
* How to design resilient, scalable event-driven systems with Azure Functions, Event Hubs, Service Bus, and Cosmos DB.
* Best practices for leveraging Flex Consumption’s advanced scaling, cold start improvements, and cost efficiency.
* Techniques for handling high-throughput data ingestion, orchestrating complex workflows, and integrating AI/ML for real-time insights.
* Security, observability, and infrastructure-as-code strategies for production-grade serverless apps.

Whether you’re modernizing legacy integrations or building greenfield cloud-native solutions, this session will equip you with actionable patterns and lessons learned from building smart, scalable, and reliable event-driven applications on Azure.

Event-Driven Architectures at Scale: Real-World Patterns with Azure Functions Flex Consumption

I have good news. We can still change that. You can still reach enlightenment and become a TDD lover.

This talk tells you the story of what will happen once you decide to learn TDD. It will go through the challenges you will face in your journey and how to avoid being trapped by them. We'll debunk misconceptions and see an effective method of practising TDD.

If you are open to becoming TDD addicted, this session is for you. You can expect to go home inspired to master the testing craft.

Be prepared to be Test Infected. Beware, there's no cure!

How to fall in love with TDD

In this session I'll show you how to add support for voice, vision, and more with the power of the latest LLMs and on device models everywhere your app runs across web, mobile, and desktop.

Multimodal Apps with AI Foundry and .NET MAUI

This balance is tricky and highly specialized. Incorrect monitoring dashboards or alert configurations can lead to unnoticed application errors or excessive data obscuring issues, making identification costly and inefficient. Azure, despite its merits, never understood how your resources made up your application and struggled to help you because it lacked sufficient context.


The game-changing Azure core platform governance feature, Service Groups, is here! Service Groups fundamentally change how we observe and operate Cloud Applications. Finally, Azure understands what your application is! Microsoft Product Groups build on this to create new and innovative experiences for Azure users who bank their business on the cloud. The Azure Monitor team has aligned Health Models and AI-assisted issue investigations with Service Groups. This is just the beginning!
In this talk, I will leverage my years as an Azure MVP and my experience with Monitoring and Governing, from collaborating with global companies like IKEA, to introduce these features and in practical terms show what they mean for us. Application-centric knowledge empowers you to focus right and take full advantage of all capabilities in Platform Governance while strengthening Monitoring through Observability. Your job just got easier, and the benefit is obvious!


Come to this session to see the story of monitoring cloud applications and the revelations of what the new features empower you to do today!


Application Centric Observability in the Cloud

Learn the underlying principles that apply to project/solution organization, how best to arrange your projects to support clean code, and how to refactor existing solutions toward this architecture. Examples will use ASP.NET Core but the principles covered apply to all languages and platforms.

Clean Architecture with ASP.NET Core

We'll explore the complete landscape of modern .NET serialization attacks. Through live demonstrations and vulnerable code examples, you'll learn to recognize dangerous patterns, understand how attackers craft exploit payloads, and implement secure serialization practices. We'll go beyond the usual warnings to explore modern attack vectors in System.Text.Json, gRPC, and cloud-native scenarios.


From JSON to RCE: Modern .NET Serialization Attacks

You'll learn how to create source generators from the ground up, including working with the Roslyn compiler API to analyze syntax trees, semantic models, and symbols. Don't worry, it's actually easier than it sounds! We'll explore techniques for traversing your codebase, filtering syntax nodes, and generating context-aware code that integrates with your existing projects.

Through examples, we'll implement source generators that solve real-world problems. We'll cover examples like creating strongly typed entity IDs to prevent primitive obsession, generating boilerplate code, auto-implementing interfaces, building compile-time helpers, how to avoid reflection (useful for AOT) and more.

This session is designed for intermediate to advanced .NET developers, team leads and architects looking to improve code maintainability, as well as anyone interested in meta-programming and code generation.

After this session, attendees will gain a thorough understanding of source generator architecture and lifecycle, along with practical knowledge of working with the Roslyn API for code analysis. They'll learn essential techniques for debugging and testing source generators, good practices for implementing them in production projects, and acquire a toolkit of ready-to-use patterns for some common source generation scenarios.

Code that writes code - .NET Source generators

This jouney through the history of security attacks will show you the evolution of security attacks and people's response. You will learn that history repeats itself, how some of the most simple things in the world can be used to hack all the things

The Evolution of Security Attacks and Threats

But are those the right questions to ask? As software developers, we aim to be agents of change, not chaos. To achieve this, we need to understand the impact of tweaking a message contract without breaking half of the system or forcing other teams beyond their deadlines. We should prioritize techniques that ensure compatibility while also considering how long that compatibility needs to be sustained. Oh, and let’s not forget that we’re supposed to solve this problem with zero downtime, as our users are spread across every time zone. 

In this session, we’ll discuss practical strategies for versioning with Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs that enable the evolution of your event-driven system so that, next time a stakeholder approaches with a change request, your heart doesn't sink to the floor.

Change is inevitable: versioning event-driven systems

What's next in C#

Using live code, let's use this journey to explore how object-oriented and functional concepts can blend together in practice. No C# experience required!

C#’s Functional Journey

Functional

In this session, we will take a look at what MCP servers are, how you use, them and how to build them with the official SDKs, including the C# SDK supported by Microsoft. We will then dive deep into the world of remote MCP servers, authentication, and enterprise scale with services such as API Management and API Center.

Building Secure & Scalable Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers

Productivity Tips and Tricks in Visual Studio

Intelligent AI app development with .Net Aspire on Azure App Service

You will see how to import and index your own data for retrieval, plug in any model or vector database to this open standard, and how to use the included MCP server to agent-enable your website. By the end, you’ll have a working understanding, real examples, and everything you need to go from prototype to production.

NLWeb Deep Dive: Unlocking the Agentic Web

In this session, we’ll explore how tools like GitHub Copilot for Azure, AZD, and Visual Studio Code Extensions are being reimagined to work together with Model Context Protocol (MCP)—enabling smarter scaffolding, richer guidance, and scalable patterns with minimal cognitive friction.


Through a live demo of a “Vibe Coding” journey from repo to running cloud app, you’ll learn:
- What MCP is and how it enriches copilots with contextual awareness
- How GitHub Copilot for Azure leverages MCP to reason more effectively about infra, code, and intent
- How AZD and VS Code Extensions use that context to streamline deployment and debugging
- How container tooling fits into this AI-native loop, improving feedback for both devs and ops
- Why this new mental model can accelerate onboarding and reduce toil across teams


Flow Forward: Building AI-Native Developer Workflows with Azure, GitHub, Copilot, and MCP

Keynote: The Next 25 Years of Software Engineering

Whilst this conversation is valuable, most large software systems will have use cases for both. Blindly opting for one over the other risks increasing your complexity and providing a sub-optimal experience for your users.

By the end of this talk, you will have a clear set of heuristics for when to choose containers and when to choose FaaS. As well as best practices for architecting your code and systems to get the best of both worlds.

Serverless or containers? Who cares pick both!

In this talk, we’re going to look at some of the security risks that could be introduced to your environment when using MCP, and what controls you can put in place to mitigate them.


Securing your MCP implementation

This talk revisits awe-inspiring stories of fine artists who, in the 1970s, stumbled upon the magic of computers. Explore the mysteries of mathematical algorithms that have become the still lifes and croquis nudes of computer art, adding beauty and emotional depth to the digital canvas. Travel back in time to witness the internet’s transformation into a global gallery, showcasing not only stunning visual masterpieces but also the code itself as an art form.

Prepare for a visually engaging experience filled with stunning imagery and elegant code, designed to inspire your journey into the rich world of computer art.

By the end, you might even have your own answer to the timeless question: What is art?

The History of Computer Art

We’ll dive into practical techniques related to using models such as Microsoft’s Phi family, demonstrating how these smaller models can reduce computational overhead while maximizing privacy and performance. Finally, we will explore both running SLMs in Azure, as well as directly embedding them within mobile and client-side applications.

Leveraging Small Language Models for Smarter Workflows

Content Safety got everyone's attention with increasing popularity of Generative AI. How to protect both inputs and outputs? What can be done other than prompt engineering? Content Safety detects harmful user-generated and AI-generated content in applications and services and can help you with putting guardrails around your Generative AI models.


Let's discuss the principles of Responsible AI and some tools to support AI developers. In this session we will talk about AI and ML in general, data preparation, Responsible AI and Content Safety principles and tools. In the end, I will show a demo using some of the tools supported by Azure AI.

Responsible AI and Content Safety

We’ll explore retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a method to enhance large language models (LLMs) with your specific, ever-changing data, without it ever leaving your systems.

- What is a vector database?
- How can you vectorize your own data?
- How to integrate your existing data sources, like SQL databases, to enrich AI interactions.


We’ll implement RAG step-by-step, running AI models locally (on the “edge”) while maintaining full control over your data. By the end of the session, you’ll know how to build an AI assistant that uses your private and volatile data, all without relying on external cloud services.

Or isn't the cloud a scary thing? We rely on Azure for all our workloads, so let's also take a look on what the cloud can add to this equation.

The RAGged Edge: Keep your data and AI close

You will see the impacts of different coding patterns in terms of memory consumption and on your applications behavior within or outside of Azure.
Expect digging into interpolated strings and even creating String in weird ways.

String and memory: a long love story in .NET

In this practical, deep-dive session, you’ll learn exactly how Agentic Software Delivery transforms your GitHub Copilot experience into a structured, scalable process. Gain expert insights, actionable guidance, and hands-on techniques to reliably bridge the gap from promising prototypes to stable, secure and impactful production deployments.

Beyond Vibes: Getting to Production with Agentic Software Delivery and GitHub Copilot

Microservices lead many teams into chopping monoliths into wafer thin slivers of functionality, with serverless or containers, and although cloud native, it probably meant Kubernetes and sophisticated infrastructure tools to manage the increase in complexity.

There is a middle way, where you can embrace Platform as a Service, PaaS. PaaS provides packaged services which, while not infinitely configurable, can be managed more easily, are still cloud native and can still be scaled for your needs. For smaller engineering teams and start-ups, this can provide a faster route to delivering to your customer and proving your market exists.

In this talk we will examine the pros and cons of using mainly off the shelf platform services.

What costs less and what costs more?
What is the trade-off between configuration and simplicity?
Is PaaS really a Somebody Else's Problem field for the cloud, where patching, resilience and avoiding stuff like CrowdStrike taking out your machines is part of the package?

With a few compromises redundancy, scalability and security are now available to everyone without breaking the bank.

You too shall PaaS

When we say something is a "plain text file", we're relying on a huge number of assumptions - about operating systems, editors, file formats, language, culture, history... and, most of the time, that's OK. But when it goes wrong, "plain text" can lead to some of the weirdest bugs you've ever seen... why is there Chinese in the event logs? Why is the city of Aarhus in the wrong place? And why does Magnus Mårtensson always have trouble getting into the USA? Join Dylan Beattie for a fascinating look into the hidden world of text files - from the history of mechanical teletypes to encodings, collations and code pages. We'll look at some memorable bugs, some golden rules for working with plain text - and we'll even find out the story behind the mysterious phrase "pike matchbox" and what it has do with driving in the Soviet Union.

There's No Such Thing as Plain Text

Accessibility

If we take a step back to the era of the Commodore 64, we can better understand modern AI. With faster processing and exponentially more data storage available now, AI technologies have been able to build upon these foundational principles to achieve the generative AI applications we see today. That's because the core concepts that underpin the algorithms have remained remarkably consistent over the decades.

This talk takes a look how AI algorithms work such as natural language processing, expert systems, pattern recognition, problem solving, and systems that can learn. But we'll do so by looking at the algorithms that were written in the 1980's using BASIC language on the Commodore 64.

Retro AI: Exploring modern AI concepts through the Commodore 64 and BASIC

Let's take it a level deeper and see some other ways to wield the power of AI, including:

- Applying AI to custom tasks
-  Creating and using evaluation datasets to validate and improve performance
-  When, when not, and how to fine-tune a custom model
-  Ingestion of complex real-world knowledge and use with techniques like GraphRAG
-  Other UX patterns that can automate your users' work

We'll explore each of these with .NET-based demos. By the end, you won't be fooled into thinking any one technique or framework can meet all possible needs, but you will have a bunch of extra options at your disposal.

AI app development beyond the basics

In this talk learn how to leverage Azure AI Foundry and LangChain's AI agent framework, LangGraph to build 'Ambient Agents.' These agents respond to ambient signals and demand user input only when they detect important opportunities or require feedback. Explore the new era of autonomous AI agents.

Ambient Agents with Azure AI Foundry and LangChain

Now, will you learn something you should apply to your day-to-day job? Probably not. Will you question your knowledge of the language you've been using for years? Absolutely. Will you return to your job on Monday, applying some of the practices you'll see in this session, even though I was very clear that you shouldn't do that? There is no question about it. Join me anyway, it will be fun.

Cursed C#

Along the way, you will gain a good understanding of the model's capabilities, along with learning some prompt engineering techniques that drove progress in this journey (along with what didn't work!). We'll close with a live demo to attempt to solve today's Wordle! This session will tackle a fun problem, but the underlying prompt engineering techniques for image understanding that you will learn are applicable to a wide variety of business problems.

Using GPT Visual Capabilities to Solve a Wordle Puzzle

We’ll demonstrate how to use the Kubernetes AI Toolchain Operator (KAITO) on AKS to streamline deploying LLM models and AI agents on your clusters. 

Learn about new capabilities like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) integrated into AKS for smarter applications, and how default support for vLLM inference accelerates large language model responses on AKS. Real-world use cases will be discussed, such as how enterprises run AI-driven microservices (e.g., recommendation engines, computer vision APIs) on AKS to achieve scale and reliability. 

Agenda

10:20 - 11:20 (UTC+01)

Reimagining Software Development and DevOps with Agentic AI

Scott Hunter

Paul Yuknewicz

11:40 - 12:40 (UTC+01)

AI Coding Evolved - GitHub Copilot Tips, Tricks, & Spec-Driven Flows

James Montemagno

From Prompt to Production: Accelerate Azure App Development with Copilot, VS Code & AI

Shayne Boyer

Kafka for .NET Developers

Ian Cooper

The tech behind weather forecasting: How technology keeps you ahead of the weather

Neel Bhatt

The Future of Web Development with ASP.NET Core & Blazor in .NET 10

Daniel Roth

13:40 - 14:40 (UTC+01)

Introducing Aspire - a dev-first toolkit for your entire stack

Maddy Montaquila

Modernize with Ease – Introducing AKS Migrate

Jorge Palma

Azure Assured: pragmatic Azure testing

Sam Vanhoutte

"Run Query Run" - A Fresh Look at SQL Wait Stats

Pinal Dave

Creating a quantum algorithm using Microsoft Q#

Johnny Hooyberghs

The Well-Architected Architect - Building Secure, Reliable, Cost-efficient Solutions on Azure

Chris Ayers

15:00 - 16:00 (UTC+01)

Harness the Power of Azure with Visual Studio

Brady Gaster

Building minimal APIs from scratch

Safia Abdalla

Getting Authorization Right in .NET: Patterns, Pitfalls, and Practical Guidance

Michele Leroux Bustamante

How Powerlifting Made Me a Better Software Engineer

Adele Carpenter

When good services go bad: An Azure murder mystery

Rik Hepworth

16:20 - 17:20 (UTC+01)

Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData - a new .NET vector database abstraction for AI apps

Shay Rojansky

Supercharged Testing: AI-Powered Workflows with Playwright + MCP

Debbie O'Brien

Designing for change with Vertical Slice Architecture

Chris Sainty

Seriously securing an Azure PaaS application

Joonas Westlin

Integration à la carte: a chef’s guide to asynchronous messaging in Azure

Sofía Platas

17:40 - 18:40 (UTC+01)

Adding a new Language Feature to C# in 60 minutes

Bart De Smet

Introduction to Actor-based Development with Project Orleans

Chris Klug