In this session, we'll work together to design and implement an end-to-end IoT solution using Microsoft Azure, a Raspberry Pi, and a hair dryer. In true cloud-native fashion, we'll use pure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) components - no VMs allowed! Audience participation is encouraged as we will discuss tradeoffs, design, and scale issues while taking this journey together.

We all know that providing a good search experience for website visitors is hard. Everyone expects it to “just” work like Google or Amazon. Maybe there is a better way, maybe we fix this with a little help from some AI.

Join the session to see how you can leverage Cognitive Services with Azure Cognitive Search in your apps. With the newly minted semantic search abilities this technology can provide results that are semantically closer to the intent of original query. For example, can you your search return the right results for a query like "in the last 5 years" or will it just return matches based on those 5 words without any context.

You will also learn how to enhance and enrich search through Cognitive Service Skills like natural language processing, image analysis, entity recognition capabilities. Don't know what those are? Well that's not a problem because you will find out.

You can expect to walk away knowing how to generate your own enrichment pipeline that leverages the power of AI to solve your search woes. Why not use the same integrated Microsoft natural language stack that Bing and Office have used for more than a decade into your site? Maybe AI can make it "just" work.

Multi-Stage YAML pipelines is the latest way to accomplish continuous integration and continuous delivery in Azure DevOps. Pipelines as code offers a number of advantages including changes going through the same version control practices as application code. The pipeline also lives with the code so any pipeline changes needed for a branch of code is independent of the pipeline in other branches until it is merged. I will show you how to convert existing UI based pipelines to YAML, create a pipeline from scratch, and utilize templates to create more reusable pipelines and provide security and compliance with approvals.

Many developers want DevOps practices but struggle with how get over some of the organizational hurdles. Tools like GitHub and Azure DevOps make it easier than ever to automate your CI/CD pipelines but maybe you have started automated deployments but are not allowed to do them in production. Maybe you want to introduce feature flags or toggles but are not allowed to deploy to production with any untested code. Everyone is at a different step of their DevOps journey. In this talk I will walk through the most common steps of a DevOps journey and help equip you will techniques and lessons learned for overcoming organizational obstacles no matter where you are at and how to achieve your goals.

Utilizing Feature Flags is a powerful technique for allowing developers to modify system behavior without changing any code. .NET Core recently introduced a new Feature Management Library that makes implementing feature flags a breeze, ultimately which can standardize feature management in your system.

Azure App Configuration is also a recent Azure offering for configuring a host of variables in your .NET Core application. Basically, App Configuration offers a central place to manage app settings, environment variables, config values, and secrets. The feature also allows updating these configurations at runtime without needing to restart or redeploy an app service.

Imagine these two items being used in conjunction to create a solution where automation rules, deployment risk is reduced, and new features can be introduced into your application very rapidly, but more importantly very safely. It would be like if the New England Patriots wanted to try out a new offense against the lowly Detroit Lions for one week, while not worrying about de-railing their annual trip to the Super Bowl.

We will create a full working application utilizing Microsoft Blazor and related .NET 5 components. We'll cover some basics, then write some code together, so come prepared to learn and create at the same time. After lunch, we'll move on from the basics and dive into the more advanced features that Blazor can do, and discuss the different between server and client based Blazor.

We'll be able to utilize several different Azure hosted utilities as well, including databases and blob storage.

This 8 hour workshop is a full-day training that prepares the attendee to take the official AZ-900 exam. The workshop will line up with the measured skills for the exam, and will introduce the attendee to all of the critical aspects of Microsoft Azure, thereby positioning the attendee to move into more practical application of azure concepts. The major topics covered include Understanding cloud concepts, Understanding Core Azure Services, Understanding security, privacy, compliance, and trust, and Understanding Azure pricing and support, Along the way, we'll examine things like - Capital Expenditure vs Operational Expendature - Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) - Platform as a service (PaaS) - Software as a service (SaaS) - Resource Groups - Regions - Availablity Zones - Virtual Machines - App Services - Azure Container Instances and Kubernetes Service - Key vault - Network and Application Security Groups - Azure Active Directory - Subscriptions and Pricing - AI and Machine Learning Studio - Azure portal, Azure PowerShell and Cloud shell - Serverless computing - Azure DevOps and DevTest Labs - Big Data, SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Databricks And more.

There are many GIT solutions available, but for Microsoft developers, the top two choices are Azure DevOps and GitHub. Both Azure DevOps and GitHub have the ability to set up CI and CD to ensure that your solutions build and deploy correctly.

According to Donovan Brown's well-established definition, DevOps itself is the idea that one team does all the things - unifying the people, the processes, and the products. In this talk, we'll look at how you can empower your team to leverage DevOps in your day-to-day solutions.

We'll start by setting up a new Web App for each environment at Azure, then right-click and publish from our developer app. We'll then walk through setting up the app to have pipelines at Azure DevOps that build and deploy the solution into our Azure Web App.

We'll look at the differences between ADO and GHA, and how you can leverage your flavor of choice to integrate with your Azure account, either via a service connection (ADO) or a publish profile (GHA). We'll also look at things like using Secrets and configuration to ensure that everything works the way we would expect when the pipeline completes. Of course, by nature we'll be looking at some YAML throughout the talk.

Along the way, we will also talk briefly about the ideas of Rugged and Secure DevOps, but those topics in-depth are worthy of their own talk, and are outside of the scope of this talk.

Additionally, this talk does NOT leverage containers, but is using traditional .Net deployment approaches to hosting and delivering highly available solutions.