Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas 2026

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.