6-8 MAY 2025

Since 2002, .NET has grown into the most performant and flexible platform for building any type of app for any device. Target mobile/desktop with .NET MAUI, the web with ASP.NET and Blazor, and even orchestrate your cloud native development and deployment with .NET Aspire. .NET 9 was the biggest and best .NET yet - until .NET 10 comes out in November! Join Maddy Montaquila, .NET Senior Product Manager, for a whirlwind tour of some of the cool things you can do with .NET, how it all integrates together, .NET 9 & 10 updates, and maybe even some history lessons on how all this came about!

How often did you see a session about any kind of services and heard about how important it was to find the right boundaries, but until now you wondered how to find those boundaries. Or what vertical slices look like once implemented, how they behave and what data they own. And how on earth business data cannot cross its boundaries, but invoices need access to product, customer, and pricing details. In this session, we'll see an example of how the planet's largest electronic retailer would find the service boundaries for its checkout process. Then we'll look at how each service is part of choreographing this complex business process in an actual implementation. You'll finally understand the full flow from finding service boundaries to implementation and be able to break down a big ball of mud into a maintainable and decoupled system.

The focus upon AI continues to be the predominant technology subject of the day; it’s the must-have feature of any new product or service; it’s at the forefront of many discussions about ethics, attribution and indeed our own future employment prospects. But increasingly, the term “AI” has become synonymous with only one flavour of artificial intelligence - that being “machine learning” (ML) - e.g. generative AI, applied AI, large language models (LLMs) and the such. However, there are many other types of AI, which until recently, were the mainstay algorithms found behind automated decision making solutions. Many of these concepts can be found in the video games we know and love. Are these other types of AI still relevant? Do they risk being drowned out, or forgotten, in the rush to embrace machine learning solutions? In this session, intended for the enterprise/business application developer, we’ll open a window into the world of the video game development. We’ll explore the type of algorithms that are a staple of game development: pathfinding, state machines, decision trees, and goal-oriented action planning. We’ll delve into some of the performance considerations necessary to keep these algorithms running efficiently. We’ll circle back to how the business application developer can use this type of AI in applications, and how the lessons learnt making video games can help us write better software.

That's right! In this session we're going to build a mobile companion app for this very event live on stage by using Blazor Hybrid Experience the thrill of live coding as we develop the dotnet days app in real time! Will we end up with something that we can actually use for the rest of the event or will we horribly fail and watch Gerald put in blood, sweat and mostly tears for an hour? This session will guide you through the process of building an app that lists speakers and sessions and what else we want to fit in, highlighting best practices and tips and tricks for cross-platform development with Blazor Hybrid. Perfect for developers of all levels, you'll walk away with actionable knowledge on building dynamic and engaging apps quickly and efficiently. Or, at the very least you'll have a good laugh and learned what NOT to do!

"But how can I test first when I dont't know what I am going to write?" How many times have we heard this statement when we are trying to encourage individuals and teams to test first? In this session Stacy is going to look at what can happen in these scenarios, and the problems that can happen when working this way using a couple of real world examples. Rounding off the session she'll go through a project looking at how to add the testing from the start - and show the benefits it can bring when changes are requested of the code! Additional notes This session will be about 50% live coding. The first half will be looking at some of our ways of working that make testing first seem hard, and some people skills that can help that. The second half will be making a simple application and showing it can be built with testing in mind, and then showing how changing the code becomes much simpler once it is there.

Are you struggling to maintain your development environment setup? Does it take long? If so, come check out devcontainers: full-featured development containers for your dev environment. Get started with a new machine, codebase or project in minutes, not days. Clean up in seconds. In this session you will learn what devcontainers are, how they work and how to use and create them using clients such as the devcontainer CLI, Visual Studio Code and Rider or CodeSpaces. We will also cover the specification and how to make them reusable by packaging and publishing devcontainers as templates and features. Devcontainers are essential to a great developer experience and in this session you learn why and how.

I have been pushing buttons and crossing my fingers in the world of continuous deployment for more years than I care to admit. During my talk, I will spill the beans on my CD adventures - the good, the bad, and the 'oh no, what did I just do?' I will take you on a roller coaster ride through my greatest hits and most epic fails. You will hear about the time we accidentally took down a whole production (oops) and the miracle save that made me feel like a deployment superhero (cape not included). Whether you are a newbie who thinks CD stands for 'Constant Drama' or a veteran who dreams in pipeline diagrams, I promise you will leave with some laughs, a few 'been there' nods, and maybe even some tricks to keep your deployments more 'continuous' and less 'chaotic.' Let's turn those deployment nightmares into sweet, sweet CD dreams. Trust me, by the end of this talk, you will never look at that deploy button the same way again!

How many AI agents and LLM's does it take to change a lightbulb? LLM's are a very hot topic right now? But can we use them in a real business scenario? Thanks to a Microsoft backed, open-source SDK called Semantic Kernel, you can seamlessly integrate an LLM-based AI with your own code to perform more complex tasks like sending emails, updating databases, ordering tickets, and much more... With Semantic Kernel, you can leverage the same AI orchestration patterns that power Microsoft's Copilots in your own applications. In this session, Johnny will explain the concepts and prove them with a number of hands-on examples, based on actual personal projects that he uses at home.

.NET Aspire and Dapr are well-suited technologies to build distributed systems, each with its own strengths and challenges. But how do you choose which one to use? Can, or should, they be used together? We have been building a distributed application using these two technologies ever since .NET Aspire was on Preview 2. In this session I will share our successes and our failures. By the end you will have a good idea whether or not this combination, or just one of the two technologies, are a good fit for your project. We will go way beyond the typical "getting started" demo that only shows the shiny new things. Promises like easy deployment with 'azd up' didn't hold up against the large enterprise that was our customer. We fought against breaking changes between version, politics, bugs, dependencies, .... Gather around kids, I've got some war stories to share with you.