Boston Code Camp 32 - Sessions

Even if you've never heard of adaptive cards, you've probably used them in applications like Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and Windows 10. Developers can use adaptive cards to build snippets of UI that are rendered natively inside of another application. In this session you'll learn how to create your own adaptive cards, send them to Microsoft Teams, and respond to actions when users interact with the card. You'll even learn how to host adaptive cards in a web page. Join in for a quick intro to this new open-source UI tool set! More

We are developing an integrated, inexpensive, state-of-the-art, compliant suite of tools and services to deliver decision support to hospital systems. Our mission is to simultaneously improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs by extracting the maximum value from healthcare data. More

In this session we will explore the differences between Databricks and its foundation Spark, how easy it is to get started, what the Azure difference is, and common workloads in which we’re seeing it being used. More

In this session we will compare the offerings of Azure SQL Databases, then dig in and show what separates SQL Managed Instances from the rest. We’ll take a look at challenges that previously prevented migrations to Azure, the current features available, some common architectures, and backup and restore options. More

In this session, we'll look at the Microsoft Virtual Assistant Template, successor to the Enterprise Template. During the session, we will inspect the code that goes into a chat bot and introduce you to related conversational Artificial Intelligence tools. We'll then demo a bot that we'll build and deploy together during the session. More

Background: Now it’s the cloud computing era. Developers want to build infrastructure as code so they can repeat and reproduce the same provisioning processes. Challenge: 1. Provisioning processes need to be recorded 2. Few tools are designed just for provisioning 3. Existing provisioning tools are too complicated (i.e. Ansible) 4. Workflows vary from different cloud providers and each uses different command-line tools. Developers need one tool that works for all cloud providers. Solution: We made LinchPin! According to the Pareto principle, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Now developers can spend a small percent of their development time migrating to LinchPin as a provisioning tool and LinchPin could solve most of... More

For almost all the organizations on this planet, data is one of their main assets and the security of data is one of the primary concerns. Organizations constantly look out for advanced security mechanisms to safeguard business data. Despite of the cutting-edge security precautions, we have witnessed major data breaches across the board in the past few years. These data breaches have exposed vital data of millions of customers and businesses are constantly looking for better alternatives to traditional security models. Biometrics identifies and authenticates individuals based on their physical or behavioral characteristics and are typically used for security and access control across businesses and government organizations. This session will... More

Think you write reliable code? Think it can handle failures and outages in the services and infrastructure it uses? Have you ever tried breaking it? You may have heard about the Netflix “chaos monkey”, the tool they use to generate errors and kill services, well now you can create your own chaos monkeys in .Net. With Simmy, the .Net Chaos Engineering Framework you can thrown exceptions, replace successes with failures, generate bad data, delay or drop responses and even delete real tables or kill a real service. If you don’t have control over the services you use Simmy can be used at the point you make requests to that service to simulate errors. Think your application can handle all this? Join me for half an hour and I'll show you... More

The end is nigh. Your application is almost ready and you will need to deploy it. And with the deployment, the endless tweaking to actually get everything running in a production environment. If only there was a way to test everything in that environment first… This is where containers will come in to save the day. With container, you not only run your code in an environment similar to the production server, it is the production environment. In this talk, the attendees will learn about how to create container friendly applications, how to use containers to share their code with their team and finally, how to use those same containers to deploy to a production server with very little efforts. More

There appears to be an industry-wide rush to standardize on using containers. Some even falsely equate "cloud-native" with container use. In this talk, we will review the "official" definition of Cloud-Native and the demands it places on applications. We will see how overreliance on containers not only adds risk, but violates the very goals expressed in that definition. Finally, we will examine alternatives available in Azure, including tips and tricks you'll need to achieve the scalability, resiliency, and velocity that the cloud promises. More

Everyone knows that security is becoming ever more important, but it remains nebulous for most people who are not focused on it 100%. In this session we will explain the utility and differences between a vulnerability assessment and a penetration test as well as review of the kinds of threats out there and the various measures that blunt threats at each level of intensity. More

The serverless application model has become very popular due to the advantages it offers over traditional server-oriented computing: simplicity of administration, reduced cost to operate and inherent scalability of function as a service (FaaS). Serverless frameworks have simplified the development, congfiguration and deployment of your application to many of the major cloud providers. In this presentation, we'll learn how to turn a "normal" .NET Core web API into a serverless application in no time and deploy to AWS Lambda. More

DevOps is all about software delivery. Create an automated, streamlined path from development to testing to deployment — that’s basically DevOps. Great. So how do you do it with ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core? How do you deploy the SQL Server schema? How do you deal with EF Core schema migrations? What about unit testing? How do you handle database connection strings? What about deployments to Azure? Don’t worry. We’ve got ya covered. In this talk, Ben will walk you through creating an automated DevOps flow using Azure DevOps Server (aka. TFS2019) or Azure DevOps that will allow you to build, test, and deploy your ASP.NET Core & EF Core application. More

As Monolith to Microservices migration almost became mainstream, Engineering Teams have to think about how their caching strategies will evolve in cloud-native world. Kubernetes is clear winner in containerized world and Hazelcast is perfect fit in Kubernetes Deployments. In this talk, you will learn * Distributed Caching With Hazelcast * Distributed Caching Patterns in Kubernetes * Kubernetes Deployment Options and Best Practices * How to Handle Distributed Caching Day 2 Operations More

Machine Learning is the future and it’s already here. There’re so many opportunities for developers to use it in a wide variety of applications. If you heard a lot about data collection and processing, creating and training models and ready to try it all yourself with the help of .NET, I’ll show you how you can use Model Builder inside your Visual Studio to do it. That model can be easily integrated into all kinds of applications including chat bots. It’ll to provide you the most accurate response for your type of data. In this session, I’ll tell you about the specifics of ML.NET and Model Builder and then show you how to integrate your custom model with an Azure Web App Bot. More

Git is notoriously difficult to learn, but by using a visual tool such as SourceTree or Git Desktop, you can learn the 90% you use 99% of the time, in just half an hour. More

Enhance your Xamarin Forms app with Xamarin Essentials! Adding Xamarin Essentials to your app quickly gives you access to "easy-to-use" cross platform APIs. No longer do you have to build interfaces and access the device APIs directly through dependency injection. Quickly access device information, current location, text-to-speech and more! More

Ever think about being an independent consultant or freelancer? In this talk I’ll provide you with some real information that can help you decide if it is for you. I’ll give you some tips on things you’ll need to get started, some real numbers on rates and income and some of my strategies to keep busy with billable work. The majority of the information in this presentation is based on what I’ve learned in the past 10 years as a freelancer/independent consultant. More

GraphQL is gaining momentum for API Developers. In this session, an overview will be provided along with demo of tooling What is GraphQL : 5 easy pieces Why GraphQL (versus REST) GraphQL components GraphQL demo * Schema definition * GraphQL query using GraphiQL/ Postman * GraphQL mutation(update) More

Last year, at my session called How to Create Fewer Defects, I presented a root-cause analysis of hundreds of defects in a real-world system and how to address those causes. What I didn’t say then was that my goal for our team in 2019 was to reduce defects by 25%. We are achieving that goal, and this is your chance to find out how. This quick, idea-packed session is guaranteed to give you techniques you can apply in your own team! More

Kusto is a service for storing and running interactive analytics over Big Data. Kusto was designed from scratch to be a “big data” repository for Azure and easy to query using Kusto Query Language (KQL). As we make progress in our migration to cloud, we are learning new ways to monitor and alert on resources and services. Microsoft has consolidated many services under the umbrella of ‘Azure Monitor’. Whether you are ‘detecting and diagnose issues across applications and dependencies’, ‘correlate infrastructure issues with Azure Monitor for VMs’, ‘drill into your SQL database monitoring data with Log Analytics’ you will be using ‘Azure Monitor’. Azure Monitor uses a version of the KQL used by Azure Data Explorer that is suitable for simple log queries but... More

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) philosophy is becoming the standard for managing infrastructure both on-premise and in the cloud. IaC uses a template approach for provisioning IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS resources which provides many benefits such as versioning, preventing drifting and even for the quick creation of a Proof of Concept (PoC). In this presentation, Dan will cover Terraform. Terraform is a tool for building, changing and versioning infrastructure as code. With Terraform you can manage Compute, Networking, DNS and many other resources using a simple Declarative Programming Language Terraform supports all the Major Cloud Providers: AWS, Azure, CGP, etc... During this presentation Dan will go over setting up various popular resources in AWS, Azure... More

This session will focus on demonstrating how an intelligent document classification system was developed using NLP and AI, and how the system leveraged BERT, ELMo and other word embedding techniques for creating distributed semantic representations that provides the context based insights of the documents. This session also will demonstrate how semantics can be used to develop deep learning network for sentence classification that flags and identify questionable entities and language of interest of documents in an automated manner. More

The Bot Framework SDK allows developers to model and build sophisticated conversational bots in Azure. This session will explain the architecture, chatbot concepts, and bot state management. Then you'll learn how to build a bot that accepts natural language commands using Azure cognitive services (LUIS), and disambiguates them using the SDK's dialog capabilities. Finally, you'll learn how to publish your bot in Microsoft Teams. More

WebAssembly is shaking up the development world for lots of good reasons. If you're a C# fan, browser-based technologies seem sub-optimal. We have solid coding skills, and we want to bring them to all the new platforms. We'll take a look at the amazing tools we can use to bring .NET Core 3, WinUI, and C# not only to WebAssembly, but also to Android and IOS with UnoPlatform. More

We'll cover the new way of creating Xamarin.Forms apps using Shell, which was introduced this spring in Xamarin.Forms 4.0. Shell provides a fast and easy way to scaffold your application and provides URI navigation from page to page. We'll also cover the search functionality that comes with Shell. Some experience with Xamarin.Forms is suggested. More

Static Site Generators offer amazing performance in a simplified development workflow that focuses on the basics: HTML, CSS, & JS. So what exactly are they, what can they do? This talk will start by figuring out where Static Site Generators (SSG) fit in the current and historical context of web development. And how SSG sites compare to other strategies like traditional server render apps or client-side single page applications and what tradeoffs are inherent to each strategy. We’ll make the case for a simpler, faster, and more resilient set of tools using static hosting and known (somewhat strangely) as the JAMstack. We'll then walk through every step of creating, building, and deploying a static website with a live demo to show what an excellent... More

Keeping secrets safe and out of source code has always been challenging. De-coupling sensitive information like connection strings, certificates and passwords keeps these secrets out of source control where it is all to easy to expose them unintentionally. This session focuses mostly on .Net Core Configuration and also provides an overview of how to leverage Azure App Service Settings, KeyVault and Managed Identities for Azure Resources to help alleviate this long-standing problem. Additionally we will see how to consume configuration even when you, the developer, don't have access to production secrets. Demonstrated are three application scenarios - A non-Azure-hosted app, An Azure-hosted app and local debugging. Time permitting, we will also see... More

Azure Search offers powerful Cognitive search to enrich your index. In this session, we’ll cover the Index, Indexer, and Querying on structured and unstructured data, Cognitive search capabilities using the Azure portal, and using REST API’s using C#. More

You’ve been to a restaurant before, right? Have you noticed how everything is structured? Everyone has a job and there is a chain of command. You can’t just walk into the kitchen and tell the cook how you want your steak done. Kubernetes is actually very similar to this. You will deploy some pods that do specific things and set the rules of communications that dictate how they all talk to each other. By expanding on the idea of a restaurant, the speaker will slowly introduce some of the basic concepts behind modern devops in a fun and easy to understand way. The attendees will come out of this talk with a whole new perspective on what kubernetes does and how to apply this in their software development practices. More

Moderator: Ron Krawitz Anil Galloway: Intune - An Enterprise Mobility Management Tool Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based enterprise mobility management tool that helps businesses manage employees’ mobile devices that have access to corporate data. This talk discusses some of the more important features that are available with Intune including Wi-Fi, virtual private network profiles, and configuring mobile devices. Bryan Garson: Building Projects with Kanban Kanban is a widely used process/methodology for agile software development. This talk will acquaint you with what Kanban is and provide a general overview the Kanban process. You will also learn the three rules of Kanab, see a Kanban board, learn how teams use the Kanban board, and learn about... More

Microsoft Graph is the gateway to data and intelligence in Microsoft 365. For developers, the Microsoft Graph provides RESTful, authenticated access to users profile and activities within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem including Office, Window s 10, Azure Active Directory, and more. When you integrate with Graph you are able to provide end-users a more personalized (if not prescient) experience by melding the vast amounts of utilization data in Microsoft 365 with your application’s own unique business value. In this talk we’ll outline the Graph ecosystem and API surface, experiment with low-barrier to entry tools (like Graph Explorer), and build a simple, single-page application that leverages a few of the Graph APIs. More

Microsoft's PowerPlatform is billed as a no-code/low-code solution targeted to business power users, aka citizen developers. What does this mean for the modern developer? Is this a real or another flash in the pan? Microsoft is investing heavily in it, it's not going anywhere. Come to this session to learn more about the Power Platform and its features PowerApps and Flow, the implications to enterprises, and why we developers should consider it. More

This session was conducted for PASS and Microsoft on June 9th, 2019. Want to get off of older versions of SQL Server and go to SQL 2017 or SQL 2019? Then this session is just what the doctor would order for you! This presentation is a part of the event "Modern Data Tour" organized by PASS. In this session we will cover: 1. Is it right time to upgrade? 2. How do you certify your database? The advantages and disadvantages of all of them. 3. DB behavior under various compatibility levels 4. Differences between deprecated and discontinued functionality 5. Simplified Upgrade Process using three of best F R E E tools by Microsoft: a. Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit(MAP) b. Database Migration Assistant (DMA) c. Database Experimentation Assistant... More

Further to my "How to get and nail your interviews" comes this follow up session. Congratulations! You’ve been asked back for a second interview. At this point, you're being seriously considered for the position based on your success in the first interview. You were well-prepared for the initial meeting, but you should know what questions for a second interview to anticipate. What’s different about this interview? The second round can be much more involved. For one thing, you can expect new faces. Follow-up interviews give you the chance to meet different people than those you talked to before. Some businesses conduct a panel interview so a mix of senior executives, managers and potential coworkers can get to know you at the same time. To show... More

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is now updated each month with the latest version of the SQL Client Tools. Which enabled rapid enhancement to Execution Plan. Do you know that you can now see how many pages are spilled to disk for a sort, as well as the memory statistics for the operator? Are you aware that you can see the top 10 waits for an execution and what trace flags were active during compilation and which ones influenced compilation? Have you ever analyzed a big plan and wish you could search for table name, index name or column name without opening XML plan? When you see a clustered index was used do you know for sure which statistics were used by the Query Optimizer to estimate the number of rows? In this demo intensive session, I... More

We all know that we should be writing unit tests for our applications. But what do you do about that database code? Data access code is FAMOUS for wrecking our dreams for a clean, unit testable application. Add ASP.NET MVC and application security into the mix and those unit testing dreams just drift further and further away. It doesn't have to be that way. Heck! It's not even that hard to do! It just takes a little bit of planning and some basic design patterns. In this session, we'll go through how to design and build your ASP.NET MVC & Entity Framework applications so that you've got a clean, maintainable, and unit testable design. More

Whether you are a tester or a developer of HTTP API’s, chances are you are already using Postman to some degree. Chances are also that you are missing out on some of the advanced goodness. Using only features of the free version, this session introduces you to effective use of these features to save time, reduce errors and share your work. You learn how to : - unclutter your collections with environments - create dynamic requests with the powerful scripting environment - chain requests (never run a separate utility to generate auth tokens again!) - data drive an entire suite of tests with just a few clicks. - backup and share your work - automate the whole shebang from the command line, optionally with reports - much more... Ditch the... More

If you are a coder and want to get into the field of Machine Learning, Azure provides the best platform for you, it is comprehensive in providing all necessary heavy lifting for you, at the same time, it allows you to have programming level control and keep the same development experience that you are familiar with as a coder. Come to learn the latest development from Azure and Machine Learning communities! More

Quantum Computing promises to be among the next big waves disrupting the technology landscape much like the way Big Data and AI have done. Unlike anything that has come before, the learning curve to even grasp why it is important can be steep. This session will explain what Quantum Computing is, why it matters and where things stand based on the players competing to usher in the age of Quantum Computing. If you wish you had been able to get a Big Data or AI overview session 3 to 5 years before they changed everything, then this is your chance to understand the wave before anyone else sees it coming. More

It's easy to do a quick demonstration of any software platform, but the devil is always in the details. This talk will explore a real-life cross-platform app, developed and published by the speaker using Xamarin Forms, running on both Android and iPhone. See what actually gets the job done and where the snags really are. More

Come talk to the folks from MILL5 about “Real World” IoT development. We will be showcasing actual devices from Raspberry Pis, Minnow Boards, Azure Sphere(s), Dell Edge Gateways and some of our customer devices such as flow computers and more. Attendees will be able to hear about real world development across various industries such as Manufacturing, Oil & Gas, Energy/Utilities, and Medical Devices. More

Refactoring legacy code without breaking functionality is a challenge. This session will demonstrate refactoring techniques using the “gilded rose kata” code. The gilded rose is a famous kata used for learning to refactor and can be downloaded from the web. It includes hard to understand code with incomplete requirements. The exercise also specifies new functionality to be added. This will discuss how to refactor in small pieces and how to create tests to ensure existing functionality does not break. The exercise will be done using Java and Eclipse, but is available in many languages. More

APIs are easy enough to build, but making sure they can scale without breaking the bank can be difficult. While there are ways to auto-scale your API through containers/VMs with load balancers, it might be better to use a message queue. In this session, you'll learn how to build an API that sends data to a message queue for processing rather just connecting straight to a database. More

Uno is a new platform that allows developers to write a single codebase and deploy to iOS, Android, UWP, and Web Assembly. In this talk we will go over how Uno works, getting started with your first Uno application, and the future of the Uno Platform. More

Follow my journey as I try to use K6 to test my gRPC services. Recently I was on two different projects, one that used gRPC to communicate to different services and the other that used K6 to do performance testing on REST services. I thought it would be nice to use K6 to test my gRPC services. That shouldn’t be too hard right….Come by and find out. More

This workshop will teach you how to run browser-based test automation on Azure Pipelines with SeleniumBase. See https://github.com/seleniumbase/SeleniumBase/blob/master/integrations/azure/azure_pipelines/ReadMe.md for the overview. You'll also learn how to use SeleniumBase to create end-to-end tests for any website. More

REST (or Representational state transfer) is a language agnostic API style used for creating Web services based using HTTP. And REST has changed the way we build modern applications and it has never been easier to create and consume REST services in .NET. Now with .NET Core 3.0, we have the choice of writing gRPC services. gRPC is a language agnostic, high-performance Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework based upon Google's protocol buffers. This talk will focus on the differences on how we design, create, and consume both REST and gRPC APIs and offer some insight on why you may choose one style over another, and why the introduction of gRPC is not the end of REST APIs. More

C# 8 presents major innovations and improvements, building on C# 7. This session will cover what's new in 8, and along the way, you'll learn a good bit about C# 7 if that is new to you. We will cover nullable reference types, asynchronous streams, default implementation of interface methods, ranges and indexes, patterns, switch expressions, and more. This session will run for about 30 minutes. More

We will start by reviewing some of the new features that came with Entity Framework 2.x and then take a look at what is new in Entity Framework Core 3.0. Features that we will talk about include batch support, DB functions, query filters, DBContext Pooling and much more. More

This will be a dive into localization with Xamarin.Forms. We'll cover the how and why of localization, machine translation, right-to-left support, and script languages. More