As developers, most of our time is spent working on existing software - even if it’s just the software we wrote ourselves, yesterday. And over time, software rots. If were not diligent, our beautiful code can degrade into a worthless mess. Keeping our code in working condition is no different than changing the oil in our car “ its preventive maintenance. In this session, Steve will cover some common places to look for signs of degradation in existing applications, and describe the steps we can take to improve our code. Examples will use C# and primarily ASP.NET.

Injecting custom code into authentication and authorization in ASP.NET has always been tedious at best. AspNet. Identity is a library built to replace both ASP.NET Membership and Simple Membership. AspNet. Identity makes it much easier to implement custom authentication and authorization without the need to rewrite core components. In this session I will go deep into the abstractions that AspNet. Identity builds atop of, and show how to take advantage of these hook points to implement a custom membership system.

Domain Events, a Domain-Driven Design (DDD) pattern, provide a way to decouple your code. Rather than hard-coding a series of steps that must be completed in response to a particular action a user takes, that action can raise an event. Handlers for an event can be added without changing the code responsible for raising the event, resulting in a more extensible design. Coupled with SignalR or push notifications in the UI layer, domain events can trigger live updates, even to web-based applications and mobile apps.

Cognitive Services is a set of APIs that use the power of Machine Learning to enhance your application. Using these APIs, you can quickly add image recognition and analysis; facial recognition, speech recognition, text-to-speech capabilities, and many other features to your application. In this presentation, you will learn about the capabilities of these APIs, how to test them, and how to call them via a REST web service and using some helpful .NET libraries.

Microsoft’s MVC programming model for web applications can be a challenge to those new to it, especially those coming from a web forms development background. There’s a lot more manual effort involved and things that happen at runtime may not be obvious.

But the internet is bursting (overwhelmingly so, depending on your perspective) with free and open source tools and libraries that can make your life easier. It’s knowing which ones to pick that can be the challenge, since they can range in quality from gold standard to garbage.

This session will be a less of a presentation than a group brain pick – we’ll start with a few excellent tools that can give visibility into your runtime and some libraries that can reduce coding, but the goal here is for attendees to talk about their experiences with open source packages that they can’t live without in their day-to-day development. If you’ve got some strong feelings about I’d-rather-chew-aluminum tools and libraries, then bring those up as well!

The target audience here is the general web developer and Microsoft MVC developer regardless of skill level. Be prepared to share your ideas and experiences.

Wouldnt it be great to extend your application by just dropping in a DLL? Plug-in architectures make it possible and there are a few techniques that make it easy. This talk starts with a quick refresher on dependency injection and then builds onto that foundation to create a plug-in architecture. Diving deep into the code of a sample MVC application, you will see various plug-in strategies, explore the frameworks that take care of the heavy lifting, and understand where and how the plug-in points should be implemented.

Applications that rely on very large amounts of data, where individual selections can number in the tens of thousands, require every ounce of performance, every millisecond. Unfortunately, Entity Framework, the most common data access solution, is not known for its speed. Native Ado.net, while very speedy, is not known for its ease of maintenance. Enter Dapper, the data access solution of choice for StackExchange’s StackOverflow community, an area of the web intimately familiar to developers. Why did StackExchange decide to roll their own? Performance, performance, performance. This talk will introduce the audience to Dapper, demonstrate instances where its use makes sense over Entity Framework, and illustrate some simple CRUD operations.

Knowledge is power. Whether you are trying to fix a defect, optimize performance, improve the user experience or increase the return on investment of your software for the business, if you learn how to listen to what your software is telling you it will improve the outcomes of your actions. In the first part of this session we will discuss commonly overlooked opportunities and use cases to leverage data generated by your application to improve performance, fix defects, improve quality, increase security and generate better results for your business. The second part of this session will focus on basic tooling for capturing additional application data as well as how to turn the raw data into useful information.

In today’s modern web world users expect constant feedback and responsive web applications. There is no time for long running tasks or blocking processes to affect the user experience. In this Full-Day Workshop Nick Branstein will introduce you to Hangfire - an open source tool for offloading long running (or not so long running) background processes that you will want to add to your toolbox. During the first half of the workshop we will say Hello to the World of Hangfire by learning the following concepts:Solution OverviewInstallation & ConfigurationReal-time Monitoring via the DashboardLogging & Exception HandlingPersistent StorageBackground MethodsJoin us after lunch for a technical deep dive into Hangfire and advanced techniques.Method SerializationIdempotencyAdvanced ConfigurationCancellation TokensBest PracticesSlack IntegrationUsing IoC ContainersDevOps SecurityIn this hands-on experience attendees will implement a real-world solution using asynchronous background processing in an application with no performance bottlenecks.PrerequisitesThis is a hands-on workshop where attendees will be expected to come prepared with the following tools and/or skills:Visual Studio 2015 (Community Edition or Greater)Local DB or SQL Server ExpressC#.NET 4.5 or greaterInternet

ASP.NET Core is a redesign of ASP .NET. We will cover new concepts in ASP .NET Core and how they impact the way you will develop modern web applications.