NET Standard is the new way to create portable assemblies. After learning about portable class libraries in the past years, it is now time to upgrade our game and start coding for Linux, Mac OS and other platforms untouched by .NET until now. More and more libraries are getting ported to .NET Standard, sometimes really easily and sometimes more painfully. In this session, Laurent Bugnion, the creator of the popular open source MVVM Light Toolkit, will help you understand why .NET Standard can benefit you, and talk about his experiences converting his framework to .NET Standard.

The next evolution in cloud computing is a smarter application not in the cloud. As the cloud has continued to evolve, the applications that utilize it have had more and more capabilities of the cloud. This presentation will show how to push logic and machine learning from the cloud to an edge application. Afterward, creating edge applications which utilize the intelligence of the cloud should become effortless.

The industry is in a state of flux. What does that mean for your software projects today and tomorrow? Will your skills be outdated? Will your current investment become obsolete? What should you focus on right now? And what will become important a year or two down the road? What technologies do you need to learn? This session attempts to answer these questions and more, by taking an unbiased look at current and future development with .NET and other relevant technologies. As part of the CODE/EPS team, Tiberiu is in an unique position to share information based on real world experience in projects that are either our own or one of the many projects we get to see in our role as mentors, trainers and consultants, as well as feedback we receive from CODE Magazine readers. This is NOT marketing hype! You will hear which technologies you should invest time and money in, and which ones to avoid.

Azure CosmosDB is one of the hottest names in technology these days. With global distribution, multi-model support. and numerous APIs for accessing your data including SQL, JavaScript, Gremlin, MongoDB, Cassandra and Azure Table Storage, CosmosDB offers a wide array of solutions for data storage on a global scale. This talk will cover a high level look at the various features and capabilities of CosmosDB and resources on getting started.

The Microsoft Bot Framework helps you create intelligent bots to naturally interact with your users over various channels, such as websites, Cortana and Skype. But you can create even more interesting scenarios!Being big fans of both bots and classic 8-bit point-and-click adventure games, we wanted to see if we could build such a game using the Microsoft Bot Framework. After all, the mechanics of classic adventure games are very much like interacting with a bot. This is especially true for the earlier text-based adventure games. The result is our Game-a-Tron 3000(tm) game engine which uses various Bot Framework features in combination with an HTML5 client to recreate the look and feel of the golden-era adventure games such as Monkey Island.We will show how the game engine was created, how the games can be played through different channels, and how we created a better user experience by adding LUIS for language understanding. You will learn how you can utilize the Bot Framework for your own scenarios while feeling nostalgic for the good old days when games came on floppy disks and graphics were more pixelated!

Myriad languages, tools, paradigms and patterns that developers swear by tempt and tease us on a daily basis. Even if you have already made the tough choices as to which ones to focus on, how can you incorporate the effort mastering them while still performing the work that your day job requires? How do you stay relevant and productive and continue to elevate your career? Don’t panic! It is possible. Still going strong after three decades of coding, Julie Lerman will share tips and tricks that she uses to continuously evolve her tech skills and keep on top of her game as a coder and a coach as well as one of the top authors on Pluralsight.

There is so much going on in the tech world nowadays, new programming languages, new APIs and new tools everyday. Trying to keep up with all of it can be challenging. So how can we guarantee a smooth developer experience? In this talk, I’d like to share with you what I’ve learnt in one year of advocacy. What developers really want from an API, from clean simple code to great documentation. How do we get developers excited about using our products.