Boston Code Camp 33 - Sessions Submitted

In this session we will explore Azure Synapse, the interface, the technology and the development studio to evaluate what impact the latest Massively Parallel Processing compute engine, plus Spark with a whole bunch of other goodness in Azure will have on my existing or planned Modern Data Warehouse on the Azure Platform. More

Come learn how to deploy Azure Kubernetes using Terraform. I will cover how to Authenticate against Azure, create the Kubernetes Infrastructure, and deploy an application using Terraform More

Many corporations are composed of small divisions located in countries throughout the world. While you might be the lead DBA for your corporation, there are several other employees who have the keys to the kingdom. This presentation will review techniques on how to prevent and/or audit data and schema changes. Coverage: 1 – Granting correct user access is vital. 2 – DML triggers to keep a DATA audit trail. 3 – DDL triggers to keep a SCHEMA audit trail. 4 – Preventing unwanted DATA modifications. 5 – Preventing unwanted SCHEMA changes. 6 – Preventing table TRUNCATIONS. 7 – LOGIN triggers to control who, what, and when. 8 – Change data capture (CDC) an alternative to triggers. 9 - Which of these techniques apply to an Azure SQL database? More

The Azure portal is great for reviewing details of your resources and one-time operations. But when it comes to repetitive tasks, you can save time and reduce errors by executing a tested, repeatable process. This session dives into the scriptibility of Azure through the Azure Command Line Interface, ARM templates and the Azure Powershell cmdlets. We’ll quickly go over installation and general use, including how to accept input from users and other sources like KeyVault. In the case of the Azure CLI, we’ll see how to parse output with JMESPath queries for formatting and for using the results in subsequent commands. Then we’ll see how to execute these commands and scripts from a terminal, the Azure Cloud Shell, Automation Runbooks and even the Azure... More

Azure Databricks is the hottest new service being offered on Azure! Designed in collaboration with Microsoft and Databricks, the creators of Apache Spark, Azure Databricks combines the best of Databricks and Azure to help customers accelerate innovation with one-click set up, streamlined workflows and an interactive workspace that enables collaboration between data scientists, data engineers, and business analysts. Databricks was founded by the creators of the Spark big data platform to make creating creating and managing clusters a snap and provide a first class secure data science team collaboration environment. In this presentation, we'll explain key concepts and features while demonstrating this amazing service. More

Databricks is a user friendly big data development platform base on Apache Spark. In this session, you will learn about about the integrated development environment called Databricks notebooks and how to code use Python, R, SQL, and Scala to quickly analyze data and develop data science projects. Best of all notebooks are powerful and fun to use so come to the session and learn how to have fun in your job again! More

If you know a little JavaScript and HTML, this hour will make you dangerous enough in React that you can blow stuff up. That's right, we will craft the classic game of Minesweeper! In the process, you will learn how to build UI components, handle events, display a configuration dialog, and more. React is still the overwhelming choice for client-side development, with more than twice the download rate of Angular and Vue combined. Come see what it's all about! More

If you're a Nonprofit or if you're interested in participating in one, you can get basic eCommerce options on the cheap by leveraging a core toolset of Azure, simplified billing with stripe, and modern JS development. Join me as we walk through the business process and tech stack for a Nonprofit that hosts several continuing education conferences for physicians every year and leave with a better understanding of how you can bootstrap your own eCommerce platform. More

A solid introduction to building cross platform mobile apps using Xamarin.Forms. Xamarin.Forms allows you to leverage your C# skills to build iOS, Android and UWP apps (and more). This presentation will explain the overall structure of the framework, introduce MVVM and demonstrate getting started with a real Xamarin.Forms app. More

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman! Nope! It's just Rich Crane building next generation microservices with dapr! Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for enterprise developers to build resilient, microservice stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks. Come learn about the dapr now so that you don't get left behind. In this talk we will demonstrate dapr and provide information for you to get started. More

Anyone familiar with creating, deploying and managing applications in AWS will be aware that the entire process can be a complicated matter when it comes to infrastructure. The native provisioning system, CloudFormation, involves large JSON or YML template files that are difficult to create by hand and complex to maintain. Amazon has created a developer-friendly alternative called the Cloud Development Kit (CDK). This framework enables the maintenance of AWS stacks using familiar development tools (such as Visual Studio Code) and a variety of modern programming languages. The CDK allows your applications to exist truly as "infrastructure as code"! This presentation will give an introduction to the Cloud Development Kit's .NET Core SDK, some... More

Most developers use Power BI desktop to design the visuals and publish to the service for production. Out of the box, Power BI has 29 visuals. There are 208 custom visuals that can be down loaded from Appsource.Microsoft.com. While there are many choices, the business problem might not have a visual that can be customized the way you want. How do you solve this problem? This is where custom scripting with Python comes in. At the end of the presentation you will know which libraries that you can use to extend your toolbox for both on premise and the azure service. More

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that you can use to host your containerized applications with in Azure. If you are looking to get started with Kubernetes - AKS is a great place to start. This is the first part of a two part presentation. In this part of the presentation I'll cover topics that should help you get started, such as: 1. High level overview of containers, Docker and Kubernetes 2. How to provision an AKS cluster 3. Using the Kubernetes dashboard 4. Using kubectl with AKS More

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that you can use to host your containerized applications with in Azure. If you are looking to get started with Kubernetes - AKS is a great place to start. This is the second part of a two part presentation. In this part of the presentation I'll cover topics that should help you get started, such as: 1. Deploying an application to AKS 2. Helm - what it is and how to use it 3. Walkthrough a DevOps pipeline 4. Visual Studio 2019 tooling More

A thorough (and hopefully entertaining) approach to giving great presentations. More

How to add dynamic context-sensitive help popup and panels to the UI application built in React and serve from the content-management system. More

In the software community we use experience all the time. We look for experience when we're looking for jobs. We look at people who have experience when we have questions. But what exactly does it mean? Does experience mean that the people who have it will generally have the answers? Does it mean the people with the most experience should get the job? How much experience do you need to define yourself as a junior, mid level, senior software developer? Does X years in software development mean anything? Does having a BS, MS, or Ph.D in software development help a persons career? How does experience relate to a successful software project? These are the type of questions we'll be asking ourselves and trying to understand what exactly experience means. More

We have all been hearing about or working with microservice architecture for a number of years now. Those companies that made the move have reaped the benefits of breaking up the monolith into smaller distributed and highly decoupled services. We have improved maintainability, improved responsiveness to the business, improved testability, eased deployments, decreased downtimes, improved fault tolerance among many other improvements. In many ways, this shift has changed for developers, businesses and architects what we do and how we do it. The next step in this evolution is to break up the user interface monolith and reap these same benefits in user interface development. Many of the lessons learned from working with microservices can be applied to... More

It seems that password breaches are in the news almost every week. Multi-factor authentication is an important tool to preventing account compromise when passwords are leaked. Come to this session to see how to use multi-factor authentication in ASP.NET Core. We will focus on the latest and greatest multi-factor technologies called FIDO2 and Web Authentication, which improve upon other multi-factor approaches we’ve had in the past. More

Five years ago there were a limited number of ways to deploy and use the SQL Server engine in the Azure Cloud. Today, there are many different services that one can choose. How do you determine which service to use? In this presentation we focus on key attributes of your data to pick the correct service. Certain services have limits on size, performance and movability of database. Other factors, such as the budget of your project, may also come into the decision making. Transferring a database to the cloud is usually the easiest part of the project. Scheduling batch processes, executing maintenance jobs and providing alerts is usually part of the DBA equation. For companies that have a large amount of ETL packages, a lift and shift of this code... 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 the 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... More

Learn why Microsoft Power BI is taking market share in the enterprise reporting tools area. The desktop designer is an easy to use application that can mash up data from various sources and create visual reports that will dazzle your users. Under the hood, the M-Language mashes up data from various sources into a relational data model; the x-velocity engine stores the data in an efficient column store format; and the DAX language can extend the model when necessary. In short, the Power BI Desktop designer is a one stop place to turn mundane data into dynamic reports. More

In this session I will introduce you to Power BI and its ever expanding features. I will show how you can develop visually rich and interactive reports, while connecting to several types of data. Also you can summarize your data, add complex calculations and provide conditional logic. These reports can be distributed to both internal and external users. Power BI is always changing, literally every month. Lets take a quick tour! More

You want to learn Python but don't know where to start? You already know SQL, and data wrangling is one of the most critical use cases for Python. Why not start with that? Good news! Python provides many ways to use good old SQL as a first class query and data manipulation language. In this session, we'll show you how easy it is to use SQL with Python to query non relational and relational database data, to load data from SQL Server, and write it back. It's so easy, you'll feel like a Python pro before you know it! More

GitHub Workflows is more powerful than you think! With the right setup, you can run browser-based automation scripts to test your web apps and much more! For this, we'll be using SeleniumBase: a Python framework for easy Web-UI & mobile testing. More

Durable functions are an extension of Azure Functions. Whereas Azure Functions operate in a stateless environment, Durable Functions can retain state between function calls. This approach enables you to simplify complex stateful executions in a serverless-environment. Durable Functions scales as needed, and provides a cost effective means of implementing complex workflows in the cloud. In this session we focus in Durable functions concepts and review how to build workflows (complex stateful executions) covering useful workflow patterns like: a. Function chaining b. Fan out/fan c. Async HTTP APIs d. Monitor e. Human interaction f. Aggregator More

The new Microsoft Edge is here, and it's easy to use it for automated testing of web and mobile apps. This session will teach you how to do all that testing using Selenium, Python, and the SeleniumBase framework, which combines everything you need! You'll also learn about User Agent strings and mobile device metrics (CSS Width, CSS Height, and Pixel Ratio), which are used to configure your environment for simulating any mobile device. More

Everyone knows code needs to be tested; however, balancing both coding and testing in one sprint can be a challenge — especially when you’re committed to delivering business value every two weeks. Since coding in one sprint and testing in another would violate the rules of Scrum, there needs to be another solution. Luckily, there is: automated unit tests. This 30-minute presentation will share why embracing test-driven development using automated unit tests is the best way to ensure your Scrum team maintains high quality, while still staying on schedule. With concrete tips on how to integrate automated unit tests in your sprint process, attendees will leave this presentation prepared to create code with a stronger, more reliable foundation. More

Is there a way to fix query performance issues without any code changes? Making application changes can be an expensive undertaking. Hence, developers and DBAs want the query processor to adapt to their workload needs vs. having to use options and trace flags to gain performance. Adaptation is the idea behind Intelligent Query processing in the newer versions of SQL Server. In this demo-heavy presentation, I will walk you through seven different intelligent query processing features that have been introduced in the last two versions of SQL Server. We will look at both the pros and cons of using these features and how to control them if you are not ready to use them yet. By attending this session, you learn the new capabilities of Intelligent Query... More

The Scrum Master role in an organization can be difficult. You live between a rock and a hard place. You're influential but you probably don't have any real power. You're not a project manager but you're on the hook for delivering. You're asked to promise dates when the best you can give is a forecast. You're long on responsibility and short on power. (Awesome.) But you do it because it's a great job, right? There's nothing like helping your team come together and deliver actual working software. It takes a special kind of person to be Scrum Master -- Nerves of steel, a lot of finesse, and some ridiculously great people skills. It's a lot of knowing what to look for and knowing how to fix it. Even better if you can anticipate issues and get... More

The talk focuses on features of typescript making it easier for C# developers to learn it. It should broaden the mindset how easy it can be to onboard Angular based application development helping their organizations build state of the art applications. We will be specially focusing on the language features for developing useful angular apps. In the end, we will try to touch on unit testing typescript based code. @siddiqimuhammad More

Unit Testing and Test-Driven Development (TDD) arguably mean the same thing. They (both describe a way of developing software so that you always know whether or not it’s working. You write little chunks of code (unit tests) that verify the objects and methods in your application’s code and it helps you make sure that you have PROOF that your code works. It also makes your code easier to maintain and easier to refactor. Plus, while it might not feel like it right away, writing using tests makes your development process go a lot faster. In this session, Ben will discuss what unit testing & TDD are all about, why you should care, and how to do it with C# and ASP.NET MVC. Along the way, expect to hear about “designing for testability” and some... More

Automated Visual Regression Testing can save you time in testing your web apps by detecting breaking layout changes. Today, there's an open source solution that can handle this: SeleniumBase. Recently trending on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297812 More

An introduction to the cool new features in C# 8 and how to use them. More

Microsoft has been supplying the SSIS developer with a set of tools for Azure since 2012. The most recent Azure Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2019 was released to general availability on November 5, 2019. Most systems designed for Azure use two types of storage: Blob Storage and Data Lake Storage. The Flexible File Task is the next evolution in managing files regardless where they are stored. This control will work with local, blob and data lake storage systems. This presentation will go over this new task as well as the source and destination connectors for Azure Data Lake Storage, Generation 2. Before this release, there was no way to interact with this new storage. More