Techorama 2015

In this session Martin Woodward from Microsoft takes us through the transformation that the team behind Visual Studio have undergone over the past decade as they have moved to be a more agile, service focused organization from a classically waterfall delivery model.  He discussed lessons learned along the way and highlights some of the practices that the team have found worked best for them.

Do you find it painful to set up an infrastructure to run performance and load tests? Do you think load testing is an expensive affair? Do you have a need for testing your service with a large burst load just before your big launch? Do you want to get a 360 degree of the performance and availability of your application when tested under load conditions? In this session, see how you can use the cloud-based load testing service provided by Visual Studio Online in conjunction with the monitoring and analytics capabilities of Application Insights to quickly run load tests and fix performance bottlenecks.

If you are a SysAdmin who already supports solutions on the Linux platform at scale, you are probably familiar with Chef. Did you know they are also available in Azure for both Linux and Windows Machines? You can take your existing instructions and configurations and configure agents on your IaaS instances to point to your servers for deployment. Learn how to implement these amazing technologies for your Linux and Windows Azure hosted solutions.

Most of us understand the benefits of using open source software (OSS) and libraries. Heck, even Microsoft embraces it, so why can’t you adopt it as well in your enterprise? Open source can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. We probably all remember incidents like the “heart bleed” vulnerability in a popular open source implementation of SSL. So, if open source becomes more and more prevalent, how can we cope with the challenges that lay at hand? We will be challenged with all sorts of questions in the enterprise: What are the license implications when I take a dependency on a library with a viral type of license? What version of open source libraries are we using and are they the choice of the generic public or did we select one we now need to maintain ourselves? Are there known vulnerabilities in the libraries we use, and if so, are we affected by that? In this session, we take a practical approach to using open source libraries in product development for the enterprise. We touch briefly on the license types and the ones to look out for. We show you how an artefact repository system can help you to answer a lot of the tough questions. Learn how to integrate a system that is very popular, called Nexus, in your continuous deployment strategy and ensure a frictionless experience for your developers. We show integration with NuGet and how to manage open source dependencies using proxy facilities so you can ensure only a curated set of libraries are used, and meet compliance requirements for your business.

Dependency management in ASP.NET evolved from absent to a first-class citizen. You’re likely already using NuGet, so why should you care about other package managers, such as Bower, NPM and Grunt? And what about DNX and the XRE?
Which tool should I use when? What are the pros and cons of my choice? If you’re new to this and no longer can see the forest for the trees, this session will explain the basics and guide you back on track.

During this presentation Peter will take you through a whirlwind tour of the Atlassian Toolset (JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo, Stash,...) to show you how these tools can create a complete ALM ecosystem for you. 
From gathering requirements, to managing a product backlog to providing production support. These tools can help you do it all in an integrated and easily configurable way. 
At the end of this session you'll have a clear idea of how these tools can help you improve your ALM process, how you can achieve a 2-way traceability between requirements and actual code in production and how your teams can collaborate efficiently and effectively. 

For many DevOps is used to describe the process of release automation. DevOps is the desire by development to use automation to help build bridges with operations. Model driven deployment coupled with improved reporting and transparency enables operations and development to work together by providing a common language and trusted set of techniques. But the promise of DevOps is so much more than release, it should be about building a strong set of working practices between operations and development that foster trust, cooperation and in so doing so reduce waste and increase value. Agile has provided a framework that allows development teams to collaborate more effectively. Agile has changed the lifecycle and practices development use. But can the Agile lifecycle be employed across to operations, and what would the broader lifecycle look like?

In this talk Dave West, Chief Product Officer at Tasktop describes the challenges and opportunities that Agile + real DevOps affords organizations. He presents a broad view of a Agile+DevOps lifecycle showing all the integration points.

Support for Git was added into Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server back in 2013. In this session you will learn more about why you might want to use Git for your next project, what makes DVCS a powerful model for software development and when you might want to choose Git over TFVC for version control. We will learn about the fundamentals of a repository and how to successfully collaborate using Git in your Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online account. This session would be ideal for people wanting to understand the fundamentals of Git and how the Git support in Microsoft Team Foundation Server works under the hood.

Continuous Delivery is something that many companies want to implement. But how do you do this, where do you start?, and which tools do you use?

In this session I will talk a bit about continuous delivery in general and the dive into the toolset of Visual Studio Online and how VSO can help you create your Deployment Pipeline with tools like Build, Release Management and Powershell DSC.

A walk through of using build in the vNext version of TFS.

Want to see some of the upcoming new features of EF7 in action? We'll spend this session looking at code and running demos to see EF7 inASP.NET 5 apps and the K (DNX) runtime, apps that target Azure Table Storage, play some games on Windows Phone and Windows Store apps and debug through some of the new API features. No slides, all code.