We'll start with a working minimal implementation of an escape room with microservice puzzles that follow a typical naive implementation of a "microservice architecture", and see how they fail. From the failures we will see how each of the puzzles can be improved to be made more scalable and fault tolerant. We'll then explore some more advanced distributed systems concepts

Senior developers beginning to take steps into the world of distributed systems

Developers interested in learning IoT basics

Anyone that wants to learn how to make their existing microservices more scalable and fault tolerant

Introducing messaging via Azure Service Bus

What further patterns should attendees learn about

Let's escape! A full play through of our escape room

This will give attendees an overview of the basic patterns of distributed systems enabling attendees to see how to transition their current systems to a better distributed systems architecture. Attendees will also get a basic introduction to IoT devices.

This is a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) workshop. Therefore, attendees are required to bring their own device with the necessary software already installed:

Recommended: Visual Studio 2022 with the 

The NanoFramework does not work with Jetbrains Rider.

The NanoFramework extenions will not work on 32 bits OSs or ARM platforms.

If you are bringing an ARM CPU machine, then you will have to have access to a cloud VM to do some parts of the workshop development. The bulk of the workshop will work on ARM CPU devices though.

2 Days

Learn Distributed Systems Through Play

Microservices

Architecture

Cloud

This workshop will teach you everything you need to know to start building distributed systems in .NET and ASP.NET Core and how to combine multiple services to choose the right tool for each use case you might encounter. We will define clear requirements for a system and proceed to build the entire system using all the services and tools you will use to build your own systems later at your company.

Defining the system we need to build with clear requirements

Understanding Monoliths and Microservices

Understanding what “cloud native” means

Implementing observability with OpenTelemetry

Using .NET Aspire to run our system locally

This workshop is for backend developers with some experience writing web applications using C# and ASP.NET Core. You must be able to read, write, and debug C# at a decent level and have some experience with ASP.NET Core.

Visual Studio 2022 or JetBrains Rider or Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit installed

Building scalable, cloud native, distributed systems in .NET

.NET

Using this foundational knowledge, we will move into understanding responsible AI (RAI) practices, covering topics like fairness (bias evaluation and mitigation), explainability, and privacy. Attendees will explore actionable strategies to incorporate RAI principles into their workflows, ensuring models are not only functional but also ethical.

Throughout this workshop, we will use hands-on exercises using Python-based tools and provided datasets, with options to work either on personal laptops or hosted environments like Google Colab.

Machine Learning Foundations for Developers

Machine Learning

Many developers, data scientists and companies are rushing to adopt and leverage these developments in their business process, products and solutions.

What do I need to consider when developing an LLM based solution?

What is a generative pre-trained transformer, and how does it work?

How can these models be leveraged by application developers to deliver real business value?

In this workshop, you will explore how to leverage the OpenAI and 3rd party models to develop AI enhanced solutions. You will learn options for hosting and consuming different models and develop code and prompts to explore their capabilities. The integration with company knowledgebases to provide a ChatGPT experience tailored to your business requirements will be covered along with the concepts of using prompt engineering to influence the outputs generated by the model.

Hands-on labs using the latest LLM frameworks will be available in C# and Python, ranging from walk-through exercises to advanced challenges and group activities.

Open AI & GPT Workshop

These business processes are usually non-trivial, exceed the boundaries of a single method- or service invocation, and require us to redefine certain concepts, including coupling and time.

If you've been exposed to the basic building blocks of messaging and want to transition your system from a collection of meaningless and often highly-coupled service-to-service calls to one composed of carefully designed processes that reflect your business domain, this workshop is for you. Throughout this workshop, we'll discuss numerous real-world scenarios based on years of experience in the banking and retail domains, making you better equipped to recognize patterns in whichever domain you may be working on.


Have a foundational understanding of messaging as an architectural style and the benefits it offers.

Understand the basic message-based communication patterns, including request-reply and publish-subscribe.

Have experience using message brokers, such as Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ, or other queuing or broker technologies.


Throughout this workshop, you’ll learn to:

How to identify complex business processes within your domain

Techniques to help identify the right service boundaries

Coordinate complex business processes with orchestration and choreography

Engage in thorough tradeoff analysis to get to the right design

Manage requirements that need to occur at different points in time

Test complex, long-running processes in an automated way

Leverage observability to troubleshoot issues where they matter most: in production!

Throughout this workshop, we'll divide into smaller groups for design exercises that require nothing more than your imagination and something to write with. Later, we'll switch gears and get more hands-on with some coding exercises to bring those ideas to life using C#.

Join me and unlock the secrets of messaging's real-world superpowers!


This is a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) workshop. Therefore, attendees are required to bring their own device with the necessary software already installed:

In addition, it's helpful to have accounts ready to use for:

Microsoft, so that you can access the Azure portal

GitHub, for access to exercises and additional material

Untangle complex business processes with message-based architectures

Introducing the modular monolith; all the benefits of a monolith such as reduced complexity, ease of deployment, easier debugging, and so on - but ready to be easily decomposed into services as required.

Join us as we explore the principles, patterns, and practices that empower developers to build robust, flexible, and extensible applications without prematurely involving the complexities of microservices and distributed systems.

In this workshop, we will use the fictional case study of a thriving business aspiring to expand, exploring key topics.

We'll investigate the different requirements that need to be met, starting with a code kata and how we can apply various design patterns to our way of thinking.

We'll then move on to actually building out a functioning, all-be-it, contrived application in .NET 8 and C#, learning as we go.

Modular Design Principles: Learn how to break down your application into cohesive modules that encapsulate distinct functionalities, promoting code reuse and easier maintenance.

Dependency Management: Discover techniques for managing dependencies between modules, ensuring clear boundaries and minimising tight coupling.

Scalable Architecture: Explore strategies for designing monoliths that can scale vertically and horizontally to accommodate growing demands.

Architecture enforcement: Dive into architecture testing and other approaches that help with maintaining the architecture and design.

Performance Optimization: Gain insights into optimizing module communication and data flow to enhance the overall performance of your application.

Future Migration Considerations: Explore how modular monoliths can serve as a stepping stone towards a microservices architecture, and the factors to consider when planning a future migration.

Reverse migration: Understand the considerations and techniques for reverse migration from distributed system back to a monolithic architecture.

We'll also cover aspects of event-driven architecture, messaging, No-SQL databases, and various supporting design patterns.


This workshop is aimed at backend developers with some experience writing web applications using C# and .NET. The workshop will not cover .NET Framework.


This is a hands-on practical workshop where you will be writing a lot of code. You will need to have the following to effectively participate:

SQL Server 2017 or later, with SQL Server Management Studio or Azure Data Studio

NDC { Copenhagen }

Workshops

09:00 - 17:00 (UTC+02)

Open AI & GPT Workshop

Alan Smith

Building Future-Proof Apps with the Modular Monolith

Layla Porter

Untangle complex business processes with message-based architectures

Laila Bougria

Building scalable, cloud native, distributed systems in .NET

Nick Chapsas

Learn Distributed Systems Through Play

William Brander

Machine Learning Foundations for Developers

Michelle Frost