Visual Studio Live! Chicago
April 29 – May 3, 2024
Swissotel, Chicago IL

Visual Studio Live! @ Microsoft HQ
August 5-9, 2024
Microsoft Conference Center, Microsoft HQ, Redmond, WA

Visual Studio Live! Chicago and Microsoft HQ conferences will offer a combination of in-depth and interactive sessions including workshops, hands-on labs, 75-minute breakouts, and 20-minute fast focuses. We invite you to submit sessions in any of these categories. You may also submit across multiple topic areas at a single show, for example, you may choose to submit 3 separate talks under the Human Factors, Modern Software Engineering, and AI, Data, and Machine Learning categories for a single VS Live! Event. We encourage you to speak in all areas where you have valuable experiences and passion to share your knowledge.

To help you in creating successful submissions, we want to share some of the considerations that go into our process of selecting our speakers and sessions for a Visual Studio Live! event. First, each speaker will typically be selected to deliver two presentations. That means that it is in your best interest to submit at least three topics, especially if you are submitting overview or introductory topics that many other speakers are likely to also submit. Next, please make sure that your title is clear and appropriate to the track you are submitting it to, and that your description includes enough detail to understand what audience members will walk away from your sessions having learned. Again, many speakers often provide submissions on the same topics, meaning it comes down to a meaningful title, a quality abstract, and compelling takeaways for our participants. Following these guidelines ensures that the conference chairs do not have to eliminate fantastic speakers from the selection process because they only have 1 talk that is selectable for a given show. 

If you enjoy digging in deeper and offering hands-on experience and learning, we are looking for speakers willing to deliver two-day workshops and two-day hands-on labs that will be offered as part of the 2024 VS Live! Training Course series. 

Session, workshop, and hands-on lab proposals are welcome in the following topic areas: 

Modern Software Engineering

• Key Pillars of DevOps (automation, collaboration, customer centricity, etc.)
• DevSecOps and other XXXOps enhancements
• Operations for developers (on premises and cloud)
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Platform Engineering
• Observability benefits, strategies, and tooling
• Monitoring benefits, strategies, and tooling
• Azure DevOps Services
• Azure DevOps Server (latest release)
• Azure DevOps and GitHub integration
• GitHub Enterprise Cloud
• GitHub Enterprise Server
• GitHub Advanced Security
• GitHub Codespaces
• GitHub Copilot
• Other AI assistant tools like AWS CodeWhisperer, Cody, Facebook Lama, etc.
• Microsoft DevOps Tooling (version control, agile planning, build, release, monitoring)
• DevOps Features in Visual Studio Enterprise (CodeLens, Profilers, IntelliTrace)
• Online services outside of Microsoft (e.g. GitLab, AWS, etc.)
• Release Tooling (Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Chef, Puppet, Octopus Deploy)
• Visual Studio tooling that facilitates Agile Software Development Practices (Scrum / XP / Lean)
• Leading practices in test development, execution strategy, environment management, and automation
• Developer "inner-loop" optimization (workstation configuration, using containers, shells, etc.)
• Customizing your team development environment
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka "Bash on Windows")
• Application Analytics (App Insights, New Relic, etc.)
• Migrating from a non-Microsoft platform to an Azure DevOps Server/Services environment
• Development, Quality, and Security leading practices
• Asynchronous development techniques

Cloud Computing

• Includes cloud, server, and messaging technologies
• Container technology like containerd, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), Azure Container Apps (ACA), and Azure Container Registry (ACR)
• Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud
• Microsoft Azure new features and Marketplace offerings
• Microservices architecture, design, and implementation
• Serverless computing (Azure Functions, Amazon Lambda)
• Azure Logic Apps, Power Automate, PowerApps
• Low code/no code, including Power Platform and SharePoint
• Web API design
• WebAssembly outside the browser (e.g. WASI, component model, rustlet)
• Services in general (REST, queuing, etc.)
• Hosting non-Microsoft platforms in Azure (Java, NodeJS, Python, etc.)

Data and Analytics

• Entity Framework
• Integrating "legacy" data to modern applications
• SQL Server 2022
• SQL Server on Linux and containers
• Azure SQL Database, including Managed Instance, Edge, Serverless and Hyperscale
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB
• Microsoft BI, including Power BI, Power BI Premium, Microsoft Fabric, SQL Server Analysis Services and Azure Analysis Services
• Big Data/Data Lake, including Microsoft Fabric Data Lakehouse, Data Warehouse and Data Engineering, Azure Synapse Analytics, HDInsight, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Explorer and Azure Data Lake Storage
• BI, including SQL Server Analysis Services, Power BI and Microsoft Fabric
• Data Management, including Microsoft Purview, Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Fabric Data Factory (pipelines and Dataflows v2), SQL Server Integration Services
• NoSQL, including Cosmos DB, Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra
• IoT and streaming analytics (including Azure IoT Hub; Azure Event Hubs; Azure Stream Analytics; Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Analytics, Spark Streaming on Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics; and Apache Storm or Kafka on HDInsight)
• Data tooling, including SQL Server Data Tools, Visual Studio Code (with add-ins) and Azure Data Studio

Cutting Edge AI

• Azure AI, including Azure OpenAI, Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services
• Microsoft Copilot technologies and development, building Copilot plug-ins, using "Copilots" in dev tools
• OpenAI services and APIs
• Generative AI tooling, including PromptFlow, Semantic Kernel, Azure AI Studio and Responsible AI Dashboard
• AI in Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and in-application AI in Windows 11
• Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Azure Machine Learning; Azure AutoML; Microsoft Fabric Data Science and FLAML; ML/AI on Azure Databricks; ML.NET
• Data Science, including R and Python (standalone, in Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse Analytics, in SQL Server, in Azure SQL Managed Instance, in Power BI, on HDInsight and/or on Azure Databricks)
• MLOps and model monitoring, including MLflow on Databricks and in Microsoft Fabric

New Experiences - Mobile, Desktop, and Native Clients

• .NET MAUI for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac
• Upgrading / Migrating Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI
• iOS, and Android native development (Swift, Java, Kotlin)
• Flutter, Uno Platform, Avalonia, and similar products
• Blazor native and hybrid app development
• Voice, text, and other bot experiences
• Metaverse: AR/VR/MR experiences
• Mobile web and responsive web design
• WinUI, WPF and Windows Forms applications with .NET 8
• Design Principles (UI, UX, Interaction)

Human Factors in Engineering

• Recognizing burnout in yourself or your team and taking appropriate action
• High-quality code review outcomes and experiences
• Mentorship programs, benefits, and strategies for Technologists
• Effective inter-team feedback and communication
• Team Communication/Collaboration tools (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Trello, etc.) 
• Metrics, OKRs, and goal setting for individuals and teams
• Psychologically safety and trust, why it matters, and how to build it
• Teaming effectively in an increasingly remote and asynchronous world
• Tools and techniques for facilitating events/meetings/ceremonies
• Technologist career paths and career development strategies
• Customer experience strategies, tools, and leading practices
• Product delivery processes and frameworks (agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, etc.)
• Lean and Agile Testing Practices
• Delivering at scale; what, why, and how
• Value Stream Mapping - what, why, and how

Visual Studio / .NET

• Visual Studio productivity
• Visual Studio Code and extensions
• .NET 8
• Cross platform .NET for Linux, Windows, Mac, and others
• New C# language features
• Advanced .NET, such as building analyzers and .NET code generation
• Deep dive topics such as threading, performance optimization, and memory usage
• Dependency Injection
• Maker / Hobby / Games

Web Client

• Blazor (server-side, client-side and .NET 8 capabilities)
• Angular, React, Vue, and other JavaScript UI frameworks
• WebAssembly, including .NET, Go, Rust, and others
• Progressive Web Apps
• ECMAScript/JavaScript
• TypeScript
• node.js and other server-side frameworks

Web Server

• ASP.NET Core Features
• ASP.NET Razor Pages
• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Web API
• Visual Studio Web developer tooling (built-in, add-ons, testing)

Submission Guidelines
Please include the following information with your submission (failure to supply all requested information may limit opportunities for selection):

• Speaker's Name
• Speaker's Title
• Speaker's Company
• Title of Presentation
• 100-word Description of Presentation
• 3-5 Bullets, explaining what the attendee will learn from the presentation (learning objectives)
• Speaker's Color Photo (hi-resolution)
• Speaker's Bio, including previous conference speaking/presentation experience

Speakers that are chosen to present at Visual Studio Live! events will receive a full-conference pass and a stipend for each session they present. Speakers are responsible for their own travel costs and incidentals. The speaker stipend for two talks typically covers domestic flight costs and travel to/from the airport. Visual Studio Live! will also cover hotel accommodation (room and tax only) for a pre-determined number of nights at a host hotel as outlined in the speaker agreement.

Proposals are due: Extended Until Monday, November 20, 2023 11:59 PM PST
Submit your proposal here: https://sessionize.com/VSLive_Chiacgo_MicrosoftHQ_2024 

We look forward to your submissions!
~ The Visual Studio Live! Event Team