Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas 2026

According to the TIOBE Index, Python currently stands as the most popular programming language. It’s remarkable trajectory over the past three decades can be attributed to its inherent simplicity, an expansive ecosystem of libraries and packages, and its remarkable versatility across a diverse array of domains including data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, IoT, robotics, and automated task execution. Embark on a two-day journey to learn a new programming language with far-reaching applicability. As the language of choice for data science, advanced research, and the expanding field of AI, Python will propel you into the heart of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Join Microsoft Azure MVP, Eric D. Boyd, for an immersive hands-on lab, a two-day expedition into the world of Python, AI, and ML. You don’t need to have any prior knowledge of Python or AI to attend. We'll begin with the bedrock principles of Python. And on day two, we will explore the foundations of artificial intelligence and machine learning through many types of problems, scenarios, and algorithms. Day 1 – Getting Started with Python On Day 1, we will begin by getting our development environment set up for Python development with Visual Studio Code. Once everyone is up and running, we will spend the rest of the day exploring the Python language and writing Python code together. We will start exploring fundamental language constructs including variables, data types, functions, conditionals, loops, and guidelines for writing Python code according to the conventions established by the Python community. Next, we will explore Python data structures for working with collections of data and learn how we can work with these data structures effectively and efficiently using powerful Python language features. We will also explore exceptions and how to handle errors in your Python programs. From there, we'll explore how you can structure and reuse code with Python modules. We will explore what’s available in the built-in Python standard library, and we will explore the ecosystem of Python packages and libraries including popular libraries like NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib. As a developer, one of the things you should do to create great software is test your code. In addition to exploring the troubleshooting and debugging capabilities of Visual Studio Code, we will explore how to create automated tests to test your Python code. Closing out Day 1, we will explore how to use Python to create programs and apps beyond the terminal window. We will use Notebooks for interactively working with Python and see how Microsoft Fabric enables you to bring your Python skills for data engineering and analytics. We will explore how you can consume Python from other languages like C# and how Python can integrate with your C# apps. And lastly, we will explore how to create web apps and web APIs with Python using Flask and FastAPI. **Attendee Requirements:** - You must provide your own laptop for this hands-on lab - Your machine must have a modern web browser - You must have admin rights with the ability to install and configure other things on your laptops throughout the workshop - Visual Studio Code needs to be installed on your machine:  [https://code.visualstudio.com/](https://code.visualstudio.com/) - Git needs to installed on your machine:  [https://git-scm.com/downloads](https://git-scm.com/downloads)

Your team has solid DevOps pipelines, great tooling, documented processes, comfy chairs, and the tastiest snacks. So why is it still so hard to deliver high quality software that delights your users? If it's not a tooling problem, it must be a people problem, right? Or if it's not a people problem, it must be a system problem, maybe. It's easy to say that software delivery would be so easy... if it weren't for all the humans. But why is that? The technical stuff seems easy by comparison. The hard part is trust, communication, fear, burnout, unclear expectations, and teams that can't get out of their own way. No methodology solves these problems — but there are patterns that help. This workshop brings together two perspectives. Ben Day has spent 28 years as an independent consultant, helping organizations in crisis — he sees patterns across dozens of teams, gets people re-aligned and functioning well, and gets to leave when the engagement ends. Angela Dugan has spent almost as long in software delivery with her last decade having been spent in leadership roles at 3Cloud, Microsoft, and now Red Foundry — she lives with consequences, gives real feedback to real direct reports, and meets with her teams daily. Together, we'll share what works in the real world between our two different lived experiences. We'll cover practices that happen to come from Agile, Scrum, and DevOps — but you don't need to adopt any particular methodology to use them. Whether your organization loves that stuff, hates it, or has never heard of it, these patterns work. No transformation required. No permission needed. You will learn: - Patterns worth stealing: what actually works, stripped of the dogma - The leadership shift: why your technical skills might be working against you - Communication and feedback techniques that reduce friction and conflict - Metrics that improve morale and performance — not undermine them - How to navigate complexity, constraints, and uncertainty - Practical tools you can use Monday morning when you go back to the office, wherever that is The code is the easy part. The people are the hard part. This workshop is about the people. Attendee Requirements: - You must provide your own laptop computer (Windows or Mac) for this hands-on lab. - All other requirements will be listed 2 weeks prior to the hands-on lab

Spend a day learning how to build distributed applications with the newly announced .NET Aspire stack and ASP.NET Core. This workshop is for existing .NET developers looking to fully understand what .NET Aspire is, why they should use .NET Aspire, and how to integrate .NET Aspire into their applications. In the morning we will go through the basics of .NET Aspire and how to add it to an existing ASP.NET Core API backend and Blazor frontend application to take advantage of resiliency, observability, orchestration, service discovery, and the basics of .NET Aspire components. In the afternoon we will tackle deeper and richer telemetry, integrating databases, custom containers, advanced orchestration, testing, and so much more. By the end of the day you will have a grasp of all things .NET Aspire and how to integrate it into your applications and how to continue to deploy your application how you want. You will learn: - What is .NET Aspire - Integration basics of .NET Aspire - Advanced scenarios with .NET Aspire for enhancing apps **Attendee Requirements:** - You must provide your own laptop computer (Windows or Mac) for this hands-on lab. **Computer Setup** - Windows 10/11, macOS, or Linux laptop - Docker Desktop (or compatible container runtime) - IDE Setup (choose one) - Visual Studio 2022 or or Visual Studio 2026 (latest version) - ASP.NET & web development workload installed. - Visual Studio Code - .NET 9 or .NET 10 SDK - C# Dev Kit extension - JetBrains Rider with .NET Aspire plugin For more information see: [https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals/setup-tooling](https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals/setup-tooling)

Join Nik as he takes you beyond the basics of performance profiling and into the real world of optimizing open source libraries. In this session, you’ll learn how to use the Visual Studio Profiler to run CPU and .NET Allocation traces, and how to combine those insights with BenchmarkDotNet and GitHub Copilot to make meaningful performance improvements. Whether you're contributing to open source or just want to sharpen your profiling skills, this talk will give you practical techniques and workflows you can apply immediately.

We'll dive into the design principles and architectural patterns essential for building applications with zero downtime, zero data loss, and seamless scalability. We'll walk through a real world ecommerce app to illustrate patterns like active-active replication, circuit breaker, and saga transactions. Learn how these patterns are operationalized in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Cosmos DB, and other critical Azure services. Gain actionable insights on developing, monitoring, and optimizing distributed apps for performance. By the end of this session, developers will have the tools to architect and build robust, fault-tolerant systems tailored to business-critical demands.

Python is a general-purpose programming language and platform that provides a rich ecosystem of powerful features and libraries. As a dynamically-typed object-oriented language using "significant whitespace" to denote scope blocks (instead of lexical markers), Python is relatively easy for the .NET developer to pick up, and Python's success in the world of "data science" makes it a great "second language" for any .NET developer.

Author, Trainer, Developer Let's be honest — most teams use branches as a substitute for clarity. Can't decide on a feature's priority? Branch it. Can't ship without a meeting? Branch it. Not sure if it's even going to production? Definitely branch it. In this talk, we'll break down why we branch, not just how. We'll explore the difference between branches that support clean delivery versus ones that just postpone hard decisions. You'll learn when branching is helpful (isolation for stability, long-running experiments, clean hotfixes) and when it's a sign of deeper team issues (fear-based development, no release strategy, unclear ownership). We'll cover practical, modern Git workflows — from trunk-based development to feature flags to Git Flow-lite — and how to choose the right one for your team size, release frequency, and deployment strategy. This isn't just a Git talk. It's a "think before you branch" manifesto for shipping smarter.

Details coming soon.

AI coding assistants are everywhere: 84% of developers use or plan to use them. But only 33% trust the output. That gap tells you something important. AI is powerful, but it's not magic. In this balanced, demo-driven session, Brian cuts through the hype to show what AI actually does well, where it stumbles, and how to use it as a tool without becoming dependent or naive. You'll see AI wins (generating boilerplate, writing tests, staying in flow) and AI fails (architecture decisions, edge cases, that "90% right" code that wastes your afternoon debugging). Brian will cover the current landscape including GitHub Copilot, frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and more as well as self-hosted options for teams with privacy requirements. Whether you're a developer wondering if AI will take your job (spoiler: 64% of devs aren't worried) or a PM trying to set realistic expectations, you'll leave with practical patterns for getting real value from AI while keeping your judgment in the driver's seat.

The agent landscape is rapidly evolving beyond simple RAG. Today's most sophisticated agents have self-directed planning, multi-agent handoffs, and external tool integration. We're here to start from agent and MCP basics then cut through the noise with practical patterns and strong opinions on how to build reliable, production-grade agents.

In this session, we cover the power of building RESTful services with ASP.NET Core. From building and configuring the web host, dependency injection and the options pattern, environmental awareness and configuration, controllers and routing, implicit model binding and validation, followed by detailing functionality added when using the ApiController attribute, including binding source parameter inference and how to customize the provided behavior. We also cover data shaping, content negotiation, and HATEOAS.

Visual Studio is packed with powerful features—but chances are, you’re only scratching the surface. In this fast-paced and eye-opening session, we’ll uncover the hidden gems and overlooked tools inside Visual Studio that can dramatically boost your productivity, code quality, and developer happiness. From underused shortcuts and obscure settings to lesser-known debugging tricks and extensions, you’ll walk away with a toolbox of features you didn’t even know you were missing. Whether you’ve used Visual Studio for a year or a decade, you’re bound to discover something new that will change how you work.

Many developers using SQL Server are looking for practical guidance on how to migrate to Azure SQL. In this session we will show you how to build an end-to-end plan to migrate your SQL Server to the cloud based on the experiences of Microsoft and their customers. This includes details of how Azure SQL works, migration techniques, and best practices. If you have moved to Azure SQL, you will also benefit from details on how to keep your cloud solution effective, performant, and secure.

AI is becoming a core part of modern application development, and .NET offers a practical, incremental way to get started. In this session, you'll learn how to build intelligent .NET applications by adding useful AI capabilities—well beyond the chatbot—using Microsoft.Extensions.AI and .NET’s unified AI abstractions. We'll start with the essentials: integrating large language models, adding features like summarization, classification, and semantic search, and working with both cloud hosted and local models in a maintainable, production ready way. You'll see concrete patterns for introducing AI into existing applications with minimal friction. You'll also learn how to ensure quality and governance as you integrate AI into your enterprise. From there, we'll look at how these same foundations scale into more advanced, agentic solutions. You'll get an introduction to agentic development and see how the Microsoft Agent Framework enables applications to reason, plan, and take action using tools and workflows. Whether you're just beginning with AI in .NET or preparing for more autonomous, agent driven systems, this session provides a clear roadmap from practical AI features to agentic architectures.

There are several different data platform solutions for use within your application. Selecting the right option can make the difference between a well-performing application and a poorly performing one; not to mention the cost aspect of choosing the wrong solution. In this session we'll look at the options of Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL DB for MySQL, Azure SQL DB for PostGres, Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, and Cosmos DB to see when these are all going to be the correct option, and when these aren't going to be the right option; both from a price and performance perspective.

Distributed applications are powerful, but also complex to stitch together. Between service discovery, configuration, observability, and deployment, developers spend more time wiring up infrastructure than building features. Enter Aspire, a set of tools that simplifies the distributed developer experience. In this session, we’ll explore how Aspire helps you connect “all the things” in your application ecosystem: APIs, databases, messaging systems, and cloud services without drowning in boilerplate. We'll configure new integrations for our existing systems and containers that we need in our development workspace. We'll wrap up with some fun examples that show you Aspire can do a lot more than just run a web server and backoffice infrastructure.

Author, Trainer, Developer Scrum? Kanban? Something you invented last Tuesday? However your team works, GitHub Projects gives you a flexible, developer-friendly way to manage your backlog, priorities, and progress — without forcing you into someone else's process. In this session, we'll explore how to build lightweight, effective workflows in GitHub Projects that help your team stay focused and aligned without ceremony overload. Whether you're trying to escape rigid sprints or you're building a process from scratch, you'll see how to track work, prioritize features, and collaborate transparently — all in the same place where your code lives. We'll walk through custom issue fields, project views, milestones, burndown-style charts, and automation that actually helps. This is project management for the post-Agile world — flexible, visual, and built for devs.

Once hailed as the cornerstone for modern, agile applications, microservices have lately faced intense scrutiny amid growing concerns over their complexity and operational overhead. In this session, we cut through the noise by reaffirming the core benefits that make microservices a compelling architectural choice—offering unparalleled scalability, fault tolerance, and the freedom of independent deployments. We'll demonstrate that microservices can drive transformative business value when applied in the right situations. Through real-world success stories and hard-earned lessons, you'll gain practical insights into overcoming common challenges, such as operational bottlenecks. Additionally, we will compare microservices with other architectural styles—like monoliths, n-tier systems, and modular monoliths—to illustrate when and how microservices deliver actual advantages. You will learn: - Reaffirm the Case for Microservices: Discover how microservices empower modern applications with continuous delivery, scalability, and resilience—and learn why they excel in the correct contexts. - Tackle Architectural Challenges Head On: Explore actionable strategies to mitigate complexity and operational issues, converting common criticisms into robust, high-performance design opportunities. - Learn from Real-World Implementations: Analyze practical case studies and lessons from successful microservices projects and compare them with alternative architectures to guide your technology roadmap.