This was my first participation in 2019 in international fairs, conferences or training with the aim of collecting and internally disseminating new trends in the area of software development.
This event is the light version of MS Ignite that takes place every year in the US and has thousands of participants and partners. In this case it is much smaller, maybe <5k people and the number of partners presenting their solutions is less than two dozen (at least this session in Milan)
It is an event for the presentation of Microsoft's news in different aspects, and currently what is being communicated is everything that has to do with the cloud, the different services available in the Azure platform and everything that goes around Office 365 (Productivity, Sharepoint, Teams,…).
This type of presentations always has a bit of the commercial area (but little) being more directed to those who will implement these solutions, whether developers or sysadmins. At each moment there were about 5 lectures taking place so we had to choose what we wanted to see. I focused on the development area as well as a bit of Office (in terms of productivity)
Summary
About the sessions I participated here is the general summary.
As a general summary, I would say that Microsoft's path is Azure for everything, and in the case of Samsys, in terms of software development, this means App Services to deploy our dotnet applications and SQL for Azure to use sql as a managed solution. The goal is not to have VMs running in the cloud but to use these features (app and bd) as a service. Also very interesting are the Azure Functions and the possibility of developing add-ins for office 365
Information for all sessions: https://aka.ms/MyMsIgniteTheTour
Code of all sessions: https://aka.ms/msignitethetourcode
Detail by session
Asp.net core: from windows to linux and back
A curiosity, this session was in Italian but it didn't appear on the program so it wasn't until I entered that I realized it wasn't in English. even so I tried to stay and it didn't even go wrong, I think I could understand 2/3 of what the speaker was saying and the rest I could understand the sense.
The presentation focused on the improvements that will appear in the new version of dotnet core 2.2 and 3.0, namely the issue of being able to have winforms applications. The main demo consisted of converting a traditional mvc application to dotnet core 2.2. Of course these demos are always prepared to make everything look as simple as possible but it was still interesting to see this process.
Furthermore, and since dotnetcore is a cross-platform technology, this same site was demonstrated to run on a raspberry pi. In this case, what happened to the raspberry pi was a docker container with this webapp.
Running machine learning experiments on inventory management
This session focused on the area of machine learning, namely what they call Cognitive Services, within the area of image recognition. It is in this type of functionality that, at least in the near future, it seems to me that it will be difficult not to have to resort to one of the major players in cloud services, whether microsoft or amazon.
Investing in serverless: fewer servers, more code
After a very technical session we saw a more practical session where once again a service was used to recognize images but where the highlight was the durable functions. The durable functions are a kind of v2 of the azure functions that are cloud services that have no state and that can be programmed by us, being then deployed to the cloud, and they can run following a trigger that is defined.
For example, we want to send a report whenever a stock drops below a certain value. In the case of durable functions, we can create some more logic that, between calls, makes the values persist, that is, instead of being a stateless function, we can get the state between calls. It looks very interesting also because of the values as the first many thousands of calls are free
Migrating web applications to azure
This was the first session of a set that dealt with migrating a web application from on-premise servers to cloud services. in all of them there was a big focus on, instead of using azure as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, we use it as a Platform as a Service (PaaS), or in other words, instead of having VMs in Azure, we use the managed services, either at the application level (for dotnet applications, nodejs, …) or also for databases using the sql service. This session focused on the application part and demonstrated the entire process of configuring a solution of this kind through the Azure portal, from the creation of the “resource group” to the configuration of the different services
Moving your database to azure
This second session focused on the database part and the entire process of passing a sql database from a local server to an azure sql service. Here, the whole issue of reducing the entire infrastructure component was also focused, from hardware, licensing, installation and configuration times, as well as, after that, the fact that we are always up to date with the latest patches and root terms for some services. as dns and also a standard data backup. There was also talk of an application that allows the initial assessment of a database to verify if it can be placed online.
Excel Solution Palooza! Get inspired by the latest and greatest Excel..
To see other things besides Azure I went to see a session about what is currently possible to do in terms of addins for Excel and I was completely amazed. Although we are not yet at the level of VBA, it is currently possible to do a lot with these Office Addins. They are built in Javascript and run equally on “normal” Office, Office Online and Office for Mac. The existing APIs already allow things as interesting as creating graphs programmatically, including creating pivot tables as well as creating functions that can later be used in formulas within the worksheet. Even to create tetris in excel! very very interesting.
Modernizing your applications with containers and serverless
Returning to azure I went to see a last session about a new service available that allows you to place containers directly on the azure platform. although in some cases it is similar to appservices, in this case it allows a better definition of scalability (for example saying how far we want to increase and then decrease). It's a more thought-out solution for those who want to have a mountain of servers doing the same thing at a moment's notice (like creating models to support machine learning solutions). within our usual scenario, business web apps, the app service solution is the most recommended