Pub/Sub is where many systems start. Messaging patterns is how they survive production. Publish/Subscribe is often the first step teams take when moving toward asynchronous, message-driven systems. It feels simple, flexible, and decoupled—but real-world systems quickly expose its limits. Duplicates happen. Messages get lost. Workflows stall halfway through. Failures don’t disappear; they become harder to reason about. This full-day workshop is about what comes after pub/sub. Through a series of practical scenarios, we’ll explore the messaging patterns that experienced teams rely on to build reliable, observable, and operable distributed systems. We’ll move beyond theory and focus on why these patterns exist, when to apply them, and what trade-offs they intentionally make. You’ll work through concrete problems such as: Preventing data loss without distributed transactions Coordinating long-running business workflows across services Scaling consumers safely under load Routing messages based on intent, not just topics Making failures recoverable instead of catastrophic Patterns covered include (but are not limited to): Outbox and Idempotency Sagas (orchestration vs choreography) Competing Consumers and back-pressure Scatter-Gather Claim Check and large message handling Routing topologies and messaging bridges Retries, dead-letter queues, and operational safety nets Rather than presenting patterns in isolation, we’ll combine and contrast them to show how they reinforce each other. By the end of the day, you’ll be able to: Recognise the failure modes of naïve pub/sub systems Choose the right messaging pattern for a given problem Design workflows that survive crashes, retries, and partial failures Reason about consistency, throughput, and resilience with confidence Apply messaging patterns deliberately

Building and running software in the cloud can overwhelm developers with many tools and settings. Platform engineering fixes this by giving teams one open-source, cloud native platform that hides the hard parts and offers ready-made golden paths. This approach lowers cognitive load and helps developers ship faster. Self-service platforms are on the rise and a lot of companies are building them from scratch hoping their developers will come and use it. We believe you can use existing open-source tools to compose a platform and spend your time designing the services you want to offer to your developers. In this full-day workshop you will build such a platform, starting on a small local Kubernetes cluster and finishing on Azure, setting up the groundwork so you can take the lessons back to your workplace to focus on implementing the services that your company needs. What we will cover: Build a cloud native internal engineering platform with CNCF projects & Kubernetes clusters created locally for zero-cost experiments, then repeated on Azure Kubernetes Service for real world scale. Adopt GitOps with Argo CD so the cluster always follows what is in Git, giving safe and fast releases. Learn about tools such as Azure Service Operator, Crossplane, Terranetes & KRO and how they can help you design automated self-service scenarios. Create golden path templates that let a developer generate a new service repo, pipeline, and manifests in one click. Show a clear return on investment and gather facts you can use to convince leaders to fund a platform team. Deploy a service from commit to traffic and watch every step in the portal and GitOps dashboard, proving the value in minutes. Learning objectives: - Learn how platform engineering can cut developer cognitive load by providing a single self-service engineering platform. - Automate build and release with GitOps, kubernetes & Argo CD. - Learn to navigate the CNCF landscape regarding platform engineering with tools like Argo, Crossplane, Backstage, Azure Service Operator, Terranetes & KRO - Build a short business case that secures support for a platform team in your company. Prerequisites - A laptop that can run Docker - A GitHub account - Basic command-line knowledge - An Azure Account you can use - Any existing Kubernetes knowledge would speed things up but is not required

Multi-agent systems represent the cutting edge of dynamic and scalable applications, enabling autonomous collaboration between specialized agents to solve complex problems. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to harness the power of LangGraph in Python to create a robust, AI-driven system. This workshop is designed to guide developers through every step of building durable multi-agent applications, including: • Understanding Multi-Agent Architectures: Explore the core principles of multi-agent systems, their benefits, and how they can simulate human-like collaboration. • Agent Specialization and Orchestration: Learn how to define agent roles and tasks to enable seamless collaboration. • Knowledge and Memory: Implement long-term memory using Azure Cosmos DB with vector search and agent state persistence to ensure durability and context-awareness in agent interactions. • Monitor: Learn how to measure and evaluate multi-agent applications to ensure correctness and efficiency. By the end of the workshop, participants will have built a fully functional, multi-agent application, equipped with intelligent, task-oriented agents capable of collaborating autonomously. Regardless of your current skills with agents, this workshop will take your AI development skills to the next level. There are pre-requisites for this workshop. Please see, https://aka.ms/agent-workshop-python-prereqs for more details.

Ever wondered how a language runtime like the CLR really works but never had the courage to peruse all of the runtime code on GitHub? Then this hands-on workshop is for you! Come join us for a full day of building a miniature version of the CLR, supporting a reduced Intermediate Language (IL) instruction set with a rudimentary type system. During this workshop, we'll build a loader for small IL-based programs, craft an interpreter for a reduced IL instruction set, and build a basic mark-and-sweep compacting garbage collector. Once we get some trivial programs to run, we'll add on extra features such as instance methods, virtual dispatch, and exception handling. After completing this crash course in language runtimes, many of the once mysterious concepts around instruction sets, control flow, interpreters and JIT compilers, automatic memory management, etc. will have become clear and tangible.

Building an agent that answers questions on a database with two tables is easy. But what if you have hundreds? In this practical workshop, we will move beyond the "Hello World" of AI to build a robust SQL Agent using the Microsoft Agent Framework. You won't just look at slides; you will write the C# code to solve the engineering challenges that arise when scaling from a fragile demo to a real-world application. We will start with a basic agent and iteratively improve it to handle complexity, focusing on: Scalable Tool Design: Building granular functions that provide high-signal context without confusing the model. Advanced Context Management: Implementing Just-in-Time (JIT) retrieval and structured note-taking to handle long-running tasks without blowing up token limits. Operational Guardrails: Configuring system instructions to keep your agent focused and predictable.

Learn Web Security by Hacking like a Medieval Tactician. Step into a fortified world where applications are castles, vulnerabilities are hidden passageways and attackers lay siege where defenses grow weak. In this hands-on workshop, you won't learn security from boring scrolls or presentations, you'll learn it the medieval way: by action, strategy and experience. Morning Program: "The Grid" Log into your laptop and explore The Grid, our streaming-style, challenge-based training environment. In different thematic tracks, you'll tackle interactive labs on XSS, SQLi, Insecure Deserialization and more. Afternoon Program: "Hack the Bank" Pair up and enter a high-stakes environment where you attempt to breach Vaulture Capital, a bank tied to a criminal organisation. Exploit real vulnerabilities (session hijacking, broken authentication, etc.) to steal the most money. Our hackers will monitor and mentor you through the experience. After the Siege: Debrief & Wrap-Up Debrief all discovered (and overlooked) flaws, map them to the OWASP Top 10 and find out who stole the most money and won Hack the Bank. Afterwards, we wrap up with drinks and snacks. Swap your stories and talk about your new security insights. Why Attend? - Hands-on training: no slides, no theory-only tales, just live hacking. - Realistic attack scenarios: uncover secret paths, misconfigured gates and flawed defenses. - Immediate impact: learn to spot weaknesses before invaders do. - Unique setting: where learning feels more like a siege than a seminar. - Meet fellow guild members: developers, security engineers and DevSecOps professionals. Who Should Join? Developers, security engineers, DevSecOps specialists and anyone tasked with defending modern applications against determined attackers. Requirements: - Your own laptop. Spots are limited. Last year this was the most popular workshop, so choose your seat at the round table wisely. We'll see you in the underground.

Forensics and Incident Handling are two constantly evolving, crucial topics in the area of cybersecurity. In order to stay on top of the attackers, the knowledge of Individuals and Teams responsible for collecting digital evidences and handling the incidents has to be constantly enhanced and updated. This advanced training provides skills necessary to find, collect and preserve data in a correct manner, analyze it and get to know as much about the incident as possible. This is an intense hands-on course covering the general approach to forensics and incident handling, network forensics, important aspects of Windows internals, memory and storage analysis, detecting indicators of compromise and a proper way of reporting.

Introduction Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly transitioned artificial intelligence from almost obscurity into the mainstream. The constantly evolving models and the impact that they have on society have recently become front-page news. 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. The field of LLMs is constantly evolving, the contents of the workshop are being continuously updated to cover the latest developments. This is what you will learn • Large Language Models: Learn about the history, current state and possible future of the rapidly changing field of LLMs, focusing on hosted and open-source models. • OpenAI, Azure OpenAI & Azure Machine Learning: Understand the different capabilities of cloud-hosted LLM model offerings, including options for model selection and fine-tuning. • Prompt Engineering: Explore and experiment with the different techniques of prompt engineering, including techniques for output formatting, jail-breaking and securing your applications. • Developing LLM Solutions: Leverage frameworks such as LangChain, Semantic Kernel and Prompt Flow to develop solutions that integrate with LLMs. • Inside GPT: Gain an understanding of the internals of GPT models and how tokenization, embedding and output sampling work together with the model’s attention mechanism. • Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Integrate GPT solutions with external services, such as vector-based, text and hybrid search engines, to develop “chat with your data” solutions. • Testing & Evaluating Responses: Understand the challenges of testing and evaluating the responses generated by LLMs and develop a testing strategy that provides quantitative metrics of the output quality. • Working with Agents & Plugins: Explore the power of using pre-built and custom agents and plugins to create tools that LLM solutions can leverage to perform tasks and integrate with other systems. Who should attend? This workshop is ideal for developers and data scientists looking to deepen their understanding of generative AI and LLMs and integrate them into their projects. Programming experience in C# or Python will be required for most of the hands-on labs. At the end of this workshop, you will be able to: • Understand the evolution and internals of LLMs • Utilize cloud-hosted and 3rd party models • Master prompt engineering • Implement retrieval augmented generation (RAG) • Test and evaluate LLM responses • Leverage and develop agents & plugins What should you bring? • Laptop with a development environment suitable for Python or C# development. • Access to OpenAI or Azure OpenAI services.

SQL Server performance tuning can feel overwhelming until you see it in action. This workshop makes everything simple by taking you straight into real world problems. It is fully hands on. You will tune queries, fix bottlenecks, and solve issues the same way you would in a real project. This workshop uses zero slides and one hundred percent live demos. Everything happens inside SQL Server. You will work with slow queries, build efficient indexes, understand locking behavior, read wait stats, and handle parallelism challenges right as they appear. Every topic comes with a task you try yourself. You will also hear a short and clear note about AI. The purpose is to teach you the skills that help you stay strong during the AI transformation. We skip anything that AI can do for you. We focus only on real, essential, human skills that make you valuable in any database team. The workshop includes • Four hours of fast paced demos with real scenarios • Two hours of guided practice where you solve tasks • Thirty minutes of AMA time for your burning questions The full experience is lively, practical, and designed to boost your confidence. You will work on tasks such as • Create the right index for a slow query • Rewrite a poorly performing query • Investigate blocking and reduce lock waits using GenAI • Choose indexes that avoid unnecessary locks • Read wait stats to find the top bottleneck • Understand simple parallelism issues and tune them By the end, you will know how to spot slowdowns, apply tuning patterns, and use core tools such as execution plans, indexes, waits, and parallelism with confidence. You will also know which skills matter most in a world where AI is becoming normal. Goals • Learn SQL Server performance tuning using real hands on tasks • Understand how indexing, query design, locking, waits, and parallelism shape performance • Build essential tuning skills that stay valuable during the AI shift Prerequisites Participants should know basic SQL. No performance tuning experience is required. Basic SQL Server knowledge helps but is not necessary.

Imagine building a fully functional, production-ready web application in a single day. In this hands-on workshop, we leave the theory behind and start building. Designed for developers who want to harness the power of AI, this workshop will guide you through the entire lifecycle of an AI-native project using Lovable. What we will cover: Prompt Engineering for Code: Learning how to speak to the AI to get the exact UI and logic you need. Iterative Refinement: Strategies to debug and refine AI-generated features. Database & Backend: Seamlessly integrating with Supabase for real-time data and authentication. Deployment: Going live by the end of the day. By 5:00 PM, you won't just have a certificate; you will have a deployed application and a new workflow that will permanently change how you approach software development. Requirements: Bring your own laptop.