Boston Code Camp 33 - Sessions

In this session we'll build a basic bookmarking app that serves as a skeleton framework for building more complex data-driven, microservices-enhanced, applications. React.JS is used on the front end because it's more fun to use than Angular. The InterSystems IRIS database is used for its low-code approach to defining relational data stores. And the application reaches out to Azure Cognitive services to suggest good tags for the web page being bookmarked. Attendees will learn how to combine these technologies and better understand how to architect and build client-server-microservices systems. 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

Neural networks approaches are the most common data mining technology used for classification and prediction. In their most common incarnation they learn from a training set, generalizing patterns inside it for prediction and classification. The learning mechanism are based on simple models of neural interconnection in brains adapted for use on digital computers. In this crash course session I will start off with the motivation and then work my way through a simple prediction and classification model with Keras api and Tensorflow 2.0 library. 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

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

You've been given an awful task of comparing two of the most prominent cloud vendors. What would you do? Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are two of the biggest names in public cloud computing. Which one is right for you? To help you make that decision, let’s talk about what each provider brings to the public cloud table, and key differences between them. We will look into the following aspects and more: - Computer Power - Storage - Network - Pricing Models - Support Plans - Integration and Open Source - Database - Big Data - Containers and Orchestration Support - Compliance - User-friendliness - Licensing - Intelligence - IoT - Management and Monitoring - Mobile Services - Security - Developer Tools - Hybrid Cloud... 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

Although often overlooked, CSS can be the make-or-break in creating a polished website. A professional website with proper styling can be the difference of bringing a lot more business versus an amateurish site that will be ignored. I will be talking about the different ways you will be able to style a website whether it be using CSS and HTML, bootstrap, grid, etc., as well as showing features such as custom search bars and animations. Using the case of searchbars, I will be demoing 8 searchbars that will go from simple to astonishing and bring that wow factor to your site. More

Let's face it. We have all written code with bugs and bottlenecks, and I have only met a handful of software developers that actually enjoy finding and removing them. In this session, you will learn some debugging and profiling tricks that can make these tasks both shorter and more productive, and get you back to what you really love... writing great apps! More

In this session, you will learn about creating home automation projects. You will see different open source projects/tools you can use. I will show sample Smart Home Automation project and its architecture, tools used. More

Event-driven architectures is a versatile approach to designing and integrating complex software systems with loosely coupled components. While not a new concept, event-driven architecture is seeing a new life as applications move to cloud as it provides much more robust possibilities to solve business problems of today and in the future. In this session, you will learn how to create a loosely coupled architecture for your business that has the domain at the core. You will learn the basics of event-driven architecture, how to transform your complex systems to become event driven, and what benefits this architecture brings to your businesses. The overall architecture is applicable to any cloud stack, but this session will have examples using Azure... 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

This session will cover the basics of Kubernetes and how to utilize GKE in the Google Cloud Platform. In addition, we will cover lessons learned from real-world production usage of GKE and k8s. More

Many organizations have responded to the their ever-growing data volumes by adopting data lakes as places to collect their data ahead of making it available for analysis. While this has tended to improve the situation somewhat data lakes suffer from some key challenges of their own: •Schema changes can break enrichment, joins, transforms between stages • Failures may cause data between stages to either drop on the floor or be duplicated • Partitioning alone does not scale for multi-dimensional data • Standard tables do not allow combining streaming and batch • Concurrent access suffer from inconsistent query results • Failing streaming jobs can require resetting and restarting data processing In this session we will take a look how Databricks... More

Imagine giving an app the ability to see, hear, or speak for the first time. All this is possible with a simple API call using Azure's AI Cognitive Services. A lot of these Cognitive Services come with a free tier. Staring with Azure’s AI Cognitive Services is easy. Come join us to learn about these new and exciting services. In this session we will cover implementing two different Azure AI Cognitive Services related to seeing that are available with a free tier. Specifically, we will look at the Computer Vision Cognitive Service to analyze content in images. Next, we will cover the Face Cognitive Service which gives us the ability to detect and identify people and emotions in images. 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

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 you how to prepare for a second interview, I’ll give you sample second interview... 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

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

This session will explore pushing real-time data from server to client using Azure SignalR Service and a Pusher cloud. Will walk through scenarios and demo using Activity Stream-based systems built on .NET core MVC and WebAPI technologies. 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

Part 1 of 2 Everybody knows that Teams is a great collaboration tool, however many people don't realize that Teams is also a powerful development platform. By supplementing Teams' built-in features with your own, you can build powerful collaborative applications and bring existing cloud applications under Teams' "single pane of glass". In this demo-filled session, you'll learn the architecture behind Teams, and see what kinds of solutions are possible and how they bring business value. We'll explore low-code/no-code solutions as well as fully coded ones, and discuss reuse opportunities to bring everything from a SharePoint page to an Azure Bot into Teams. Don't miss this opportunity to learn what's possible using Teams as an application platform! More

Part 2 of 2 Everybody knows that Teams is a great collaboration tool, however many people don't realize that Teams is also a powerful development platform. By supplementing Teams' built-in features with your own, you can build powerful collaborative applications and bring existing cloud applications under Teams' "single pane of glass". In this demo-filled session, you'll learn the architecture behind Teams, and see what kinds of solutions are possible and how they bring business value. We'll explore low-code/no-code solutions as well as fully coded ones, and discuss reuse opportunities to bring everything from a SharePoint page to an Azure Bot into Teams. Don't miss this opportunity to learn what's possible using Teams as an application platform! 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

Today’s applications are required to be highly responsible and always online. Cosmos DB was built from the ground up to provide a globally distributed, multi-model database service that enables you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of Azure regions worldwide. Because of its ARS (atoms, records, and sequences) design, Azure Cosmos DB accessing data via SQL, MongoDB, Table, Gremlin, and Cassandra APIs. All of this with transparent multi-master replication, high availability at 99.999%, and guarantees of less than 10-ms latencies both reads and (indexed) writes. In this session, you will learn what you can do with Cosmos DB, the benefits of each of these data models, and how to use everything Cosmos DB has... 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