Month: February 2019

AIAzureDevelopmentEvents

Registration is now open for Microsoft Build

on February 27, 2019

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Registration is now open for Microsoft’s premier developer conference, Microsoft Build, which is taking place May 6-8 in Seattle, WA. At Microsoft Build, you’ll get access to the latest product updates, hear about Microsoft’s strategy and product roadmaps, and get hands-on, ask questions, and learn the best practices.

Some of the benefits for attending Build are:

• Learning from real-world experiences on building, modernizing, and migrating cloud applications

• Add value to your new and/or existing applications with AI

• Collaborative coding with your peers using the latest development tools

• Increasing productivity for your business with DevOps automation, tooling, and processes

• Creating and deploying cross platform applications

• Discovering innovations across Mixed Reality, IoT, and Machine Learning

• Learning new ways to easily customize, build, and extend applications with minimal code

If you’re interested in the content from last year, here is complete listing of the 2018 sessions.

New this year is the ability to bring your student-aged family member (14-21 years old) to the conference for free! For details about this wonderful opportunity, click here. Space is limited, so register today. While attending the event last year, one of the Microsoft Executives brought his two daughters and it was awesome to see them take interest and engage with the speakers and product groups. I’m glad they made this available this year for all eligible students.

I went to Microsoft Build last year for the first time and loved the experience to see and try the latest technologies, to connect with peers, and discover new innovative solutions to build. I’m not able to attend this year but I’m hoping to go again in the near future. If you can’t attend, then you always have the option to watch it on demand.

If you’re interested in going, then Register for Microsoft Build now!

Enjoy!

References

Microsoft Build

Microsoft Build FAQ

AzureDatabase

February release of Azure Data Studio is now available

on February 14, 2019

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The February release of Azure Data Studio is now available to download and includes the following key highlights:

  • Introducing Admin pack for SQL Server
  • Auto-sizing columns in results
  • Notebook UI improvements
  • Added Profiler filtering
  • Added Save as XML
  • Added Data-Tier Application Wizard improvements
  • Updates to the SQL Server 2019 Preview extension
  • Turned on results streaming by default
  • Deploy scripts
  • Bug fixes

For a list of the complete updates, refer to the release notes.

Download Azure Data Studio now!

References

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2019/02/13/the-february-release-of-azure-data-studio-is-now-available/

DevelopmentReflectInsight

Preview of ReflectInsight.Core

on February 5, 2019

Today we published our first draft of ReflectInsight.Core, a port of our ReflectInsight logging library for .NET Framework to .NET Core and we are making it open source on GitHub. We still have some things to iron out like setting up a CI/CD, NuGet package creation, a sample app, docs and some refinements to the code base.

So far is working in our labs and we will share more information with you soon.

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Enjoy!

Note: This post was re-blogged at https://blog.reflectsoftware.com

References

https://github.com/reflectsoftware/reflectinsight.core/tree/master

AzureEventsMVP

Ignite The Tour 2019 Toronto Recap

on February 3, 2019

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This year I had the opportunity to attend and participate as a speaker at the Microsoft Ignite The Tour in Toronto. The event was held over two days from January 10-11, 2019 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, and provided a venue for developers and tech professionals to continue learning alongside experts in developer tools and cloud technologies. It also provided an opportunity to connect with technical community and learn best practices and insights into cloud development, data, IT, AI, and business intelligence.

With events like this I usually attend as an attendee, but this year myself and two colleagues put through submissions for the call for speakers from the MVP community. For me this year has largely been about Azure DevOps and trying to connect with local developers, IT, and businesses and showing them up to take advantage of DevOps, specially with Azure DevOps. So it was only natural to focus my efforts around this. It also provided a great opportunity to connect with industry experts and other Microsoft MVP’s to further my education and career path.

Here are some morning pictures outside the contention centre. It was a nice clear day, but it was very cold.

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Getting Prepared for my Talk

Day 1 of the conference was our talk on Azure DevOps. After getting my badge I met up with my co-presenters Ehsan and Arlan in the speaker room. This is a relatively quiet place to get away from the crowd and do some preparation or just relax. The food here was great too!

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Presenting – Azure DevOps Community Meetup

Our talk was a community meetup on Azure DevOps with 146 people registered and we had great turnout of 130 or so. The presentation sparked many conversations with the attendees and other community MVPs. This later led to a conversation about coordinating a single Global Azure DevOps Bootcamp in the Great Toronto Area which was very exciting.

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Working the Microsoft Area – Demo Stations, Lounges and Meeting Pods

After the presentation was done we had arranged a Meeting Pod for both days to continue the Q&A discussions that sparked from the talk. This allowed attendees to come and talk with us afterwards since our time in the room was limited. I also got to work the Demo Station where anyone could walk up to me any ask me anything. I focused my demos on Azure DevOps, Azure Functions, Event Grid and Logic Apps.

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Networking, Socializing and Connecting with the Community

Of course you need to have fun and there was plenty of it throughout the two days. I had the opportunity to connect with other MVP’s in the local community and those that flew in for the event. I love this group and the passion we all share to learn and help others in the community.

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In the evening there was a MVP social dinner. The name tags for the event were a neat idea, 1.44” floppy disks on a lanyard. I wonder what rock those disks were dug up from? I’m sure I have a box of these somewhere in my basement “tech” museum.

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Wrap Up

Having the opportunity to participate at a conference like this was amazing. What was special about this event is that it was my first high profile conference to speak at. When I was younger public speaking was something I dreaded and tried to avoid at all cost. Speaking at conferences like this is nerve racking at first but does goes away as you get comfortable and relaxed. You get so much support from the tech community, whether its other speakers, colleagues or just the attendees wanting to engage with you and try to solve similar problems.

I had a blast at this event and I can’t wait for next year. I hope I once again get the opportunity to participate in this conference as a speaker, staffer or both.

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Enjoy!

Resources