Introduction
We attended Future Tech 2022 at Utrecht, Netherlands. We had multiple technical sessions about Container apps & Machine Learning on Azure, .NET 7, and C# 11. Also, there were two workshops on DAPR and SOA and another session for better architecture.
The Opening
At the very first moment two people came with weird clothes and started to play some drums. It was a bit shocking and funny at the same time and we were thinking what is happening here
First keynote
Netcompany was the main sponsor of the event so in the first keynote, the company revealed their new product called AIRHART which was related to airport management. They shared their architecture story and a small demo of it.
Containers, Machine Learning, Security and GitHub Actions
by Henk Boolean and Sjoukje Zaal
Henk and Sjoukje presented how you can create a Machine Learning pipeline that can train a PyTorch model using GitHub actions plus how you can deploy and secure the container holding the model in production.
They used Azure Container Registry for storing containers and Azure Container Apps for running containers.
Workshop: Let’s TYE it together
by Robert Jan van Holland and Bas Lijten
It was an interesting experience getting our hands dirty with implementing a simple distributed architecture of microservices using DAPR and TYE. At first we had a brief introduction about the process we were about going through, Then we started implementing right away. Robert and Bas helped a lot to understand the concept and passing through the steps if anyone got stuck with something.
Photo from FutureTech official Twitter account.
Break Times
We had multiple breaktimes between the sessions and in our break times we had multiple activities to take part like various games and code challenges. Also, we had a chance to get to know other companies and other talented people and had a chat with them to share our knowledge and experiences. We had an amazing time and one of our colleagues won a Lego chess there.
Photo from FutureTech official Twitter account.
The second keynote
by Scott Hunter
Scott Hunter gave the second Keynote online, due to his covid test was positive so he couldn’t fly to the Netherland. It was a brief history of the .NET Core from 2013 and new features of .NET 6 and 7. There were some interesting demos such as .NET podcasts which is the first podcast app powered by .NET MAUI & Blazor, port tunneling in Visual Studio for ASP.NET Core projects for having a public endpoint for debugging and testing, hot reload every where, new Visual Studio for Mac which is written in .Net6 itself, implicit container support with which you don’t need docker desktop to develop container apps, and Microsoft Orleans.
What is new in .NET 7 and C# 11
by Johnny Hooyberghs
Johnny’s talk was full of fun. .NET 7 and C# 11 are still in a preview version and Microsoft adds new features and sometimes may remove them. One of those new features that you can use in the previous previews was !! Operand (parameter null checking) which no longer exists in the latest preview version. Raw string literals feature was also discussed which is a pretty nice one. In addition, he demoed a nice feature of .NET which is Upgrade Assistant, a global tool that helps you incrementally upgrade your .NET Framework-based Windows applications.
Azure Service Bus
by Annejan Barelds
It was a nice talk about messaging on Azure. Annejan discussed some concerns of Azure Service Bus such as ordering, scaling, and sessions with some comprehensive demos. He also covered the subtle differences between messages and events.
Workshop: SOA Done Right
by Dennis van der Stelt
It was an amazing topic that needed a lot more time to fully cover it as Dennis told us. But, Dennis was able to manage it well and he transferred the main idea and its interesting points so well. He stated the common problems in huge projects which happen for almost all companies and teams nowadays. Then, he covered the main idea of the solution and at the last part we started to implement and test an example. Also he gave us some of his online courses for free and invited us to join his complete lecture about this later.
Better architecture without architects
by Geert van der Cruijsen
It was a pretty nice non-technical talk. In this session, Geert talked about how DevOps organizations with autonomous teams work faster and build better architecture without the need for enterprise architects or complex processes before decisions are made.
He insisted on some reasons that architects should go back to coding which was pretty convincing.
Also, as a member of the team, you should participate in decisions that the team is going to make, and down the road do not blame a person for failing since the decision is taken by the whole team.
Conclusion
At the end of event we had more time to talk to others and have a drink together. Also, we have to mention that there were also other parallel sessions that we could not participate which definitely were interesting and could share great knowledge.
The Timetable
Screenshot from FutureTech official website.