Live! 360 Recap

Live! 360 for this year is a wrap. Once again, this unique five-in-one event traveled to Orlando, FL for a week of hands-on education. If you missed, or better yet, if you were there and want a quick review of all the content from Visual Studio Live!, Tech Mentor, Office & Sharepoint Live!, SQL Server Live! and Modern Apps Live!, then here you go. As always, each individual event had keynote sessions. Here’s a look at our news coverage of those keynote presentations:

VSLive! Keynote: Optimization and Deployment After Coding an Angular Web App

After coding an Angular JavaScript app, there's still a lot of work to be done to move it to the cloud, and Microsoft's John Papa explained how to use various tools to ease that process at last week's Visual Studio Live! conference in Orlando.

Papa, principal developer advocate at Microsoft, demonstrated various tools and techniques to optimize, build and deploy an Angular app to Azure, "Because it's not real until it gets to production."

"We like to write out code, but our managers like to see it shipped," Papa said in a conference keynote presentation. "Our business users like to see it happen. Our security folks like to make sure that it's all tight and secure when it gets deployed to the Web. And one of the most important things is that when we have changes to make, we like to make sure that those changes that work on my machine work on every machine."

He explained in hands-on detail exactly how to prepare an app for the cloud, using tools like Node.js, Visual Studio Code, Docker containers, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) techniques and more for the optimize -> build -> deploy workflow.

You can read the rest of this story here.

Live! 360: Microsoft Shares DevOps Lessons Learned

Microsoft shared some lessons learned at this week's Live! 360 conference in Orlando, detailing how the Visual Studio Team Services/Team Foundation Server (VSTS/TFS) group eats its own DevOps dog food.

While the company has tens of thousands of developers engaged in DevOps at varying degrees, Buck Hodges, director of engineering for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services, focused on the 430-person team responsible for VSTS/TFS in his keynote presentation.

VSTS and TFS, which share a master code base, provide a set of services for software development and DevOps, providing services such as source control, agile planning, build automation, continuous deployment, continuous integration, test case management, release management, package management, analytics and insights and dashboards. Microsoft updates VSTS every three weeks, while the schedule for new on-premises versions of TFS is every four months.

Hodges' narrower lens on the VSTS/TFS team provides a lengthy and deep set of experiences around DevOps. Hodges started on the TFS team in 2003 and helped lead the transformation into cloud as a DevOps team with VSTS. The group's real trial by fire in DevOps started when VSTS went online in April 2011.

You can read the rest of this story here.

Developer Value Goes Far Beyond Coding

While coding cutting-edge tech in Visual Studio is cool, it's not enough in today's environment of communication, collaboration, agile methodologies, DevOps and so on, said experts in a panel discussion at the Live! 360 conference in Orlando.

Four developer/IT pros—now all at the executive level—provided advice on industry, technology and career trends in an ever-more-connected world, where developers must up their game to continue providing value to customers both in the end-user world and within their own organizations.

For example, Francois Charette, senior vice president of engineering at OptumInsight, explained how his company moved from the concept of developer leads to engineering leads. Audience members were in turn asked to raise their hands if they were responsible for app development, testing and follow-on monitoring to ensure the apps work like they should.

With hands rising all over the audience of hundreds for each question, Charette afterward said everybody should have raised their hands for all three questions. Engineering leads, he said, are responsible for the entire end-to-end process. Responsibilities are increasing in the new order, Charette said, noting that "You've got to make that cultural shift."

You can read the rest of this story here.

Live! 360: Microsoft Focused on Simplifying BI for Business Users

When looking at Microsoft's recent enhancements to business intelligence platforms, database administrators may scratch their heads that user interfaces look like they're getting dumbed down. Don't worry about the lack of rows, columns and even traditional data management terminology, one longtime Microsoft executive says: The changes aren't aimed at the DBA.

"Our number one persona, our number one person that we're building for, is the business user," Charles Sterling, senior program manager, in the Microsoft Business Applications Group, said during his keynote for the SQL Server Live! track of the Live! 360 conference Tuesday in Orlando, Fla.

Sterling, a 25-year Microsoft veteran, and Ted Pattison of Critical Path Training delivered the session, "Microsoft BI -- What's New for BI Pros, DBAs and Developers." Their talk centered on demos of Power BI, but also touched on roadmaps for elements of Power BI, and covered the growing role of PowerApps and Flow. The main idea behind PowerApps is to allow business users, without coding, to pull from either simple or complex organizational data sources and create shareable business apps that are usable from mobile devices or in a browser.

You can read the rest of this story here.

Video from Live! 360

You can also catch up and review some of the sessions presented at the individual conferences. Just follow this link here to some video previews of the Live! 360 content.

Improving Performance in .NET Applications

Jason Bock presents what you need to know as a .NET developer to improve your application performance. This session shows you how to address performance issues in code, techniques to eliminate bad code before it becomes an issue, and how different tools work in .NET to find and fix slow code.

Building Applications with ASP.NET Core

This session introduces you to ASP.NET Core. Scott Allen covers everything you need to work with the new ASP.NET framework and build your first application. You’ll learn how to work with the new project system and project references, how to install required middleware, and how to work with controllers, models, and views to build applications.

Configuring SQL Server for Performance Like a Microsoft Certified Master

The best DBAs tune SQL Server for performance at the server, instance and database layers. Thomas LaRock shows you what options are right for what workloads. You’ll learn how to detect non-optimal SQL Server configurations, how to configure SQL Server for maximum performance, and all about configuration options available at the server OS, SQL instance, and database layers.

Pen Tests in Real Life

With security being such an issue these days, you want to ensure you are as locked down as possible. Penetration tests—commonly known as pen tests—are the best way to test your security posture. Follow along as one of the world's leading Operating System Security experts Sami Laiho takes you through a real life penetration test. You’ll learn how to protect and how to test your own environment before a legal or illegal penetration takes place.

IT Pros Guide to Managing SharePoint Search

Matthew McDermott shows you five things you should be paying attention to and how you can simplify the process of caring for SharePoint Search. You will learn how to implement, manage, configure and monitor the SharePoint search function.

Modern Web Development: Building Server Side using .NET Core, MVC, Web API, and Azure

With so much focus on front-end JavaScript frameworks, Allen Conway reminds you that you can’t forget about the important role the server still plays in modern web development. He’ll show you how to make the most of .NET Core, ASP.NET, and Web API services to support rich AngularJS client apps in the browser.

Posted by Lafe Low on 12/01/2017 at 12:18 PM