I have returned from Microsoft Build 2019 in Seattle. I’m very excited as it was the first time attending Build. It was an amazing 3 day experience delivered by Microsoft that was jammed full of technical sessions, new announcements, product expositions and lots of awesome people!

The conference ticket was expensive, the travel was over 20 hours, the technical sessions were great, but the real value came from the people I got to meet.

Here are some of the people I got to meet and have a chat to:

• Keith Ballinger - He has ran Xamarin, AppCentre, and now Azure DevOps teams.
• Mark Brown - Principal Program Manager for Azure CosmosDB. Mark loved the ideas of my recent UserGroup talk about implementing SpendOps with CosmosDB (blog post pending 😀) and encouraged me to take part in contributing to the CosmosDB SDK
• Andrew Lui - Program Manager for Azure CosmosDB. Such a cool dude. Along with Mark Brown, Andrew was also very encouraging for me to raise issues and contribute to the CosmosDB SDK
• Phil Hodgson - Originally worked on the Azure DevOps Boards team, now he is building the Azure DevOps Test tools
• Jason Unger - Product Marketing Manager for Azure FastTrack. It was really interesting to hear from Jason how Microsoft can work with Partners to help fastrack customers onto Azure.
• Jeff Hollan - Senior Program Manager for Azure Functions. It was great meeting up with Jeff again. Such an energetic and inspiring guy. Jeff happily answered my questions relating to monitoring CPU and Memory usage for Azure Functions at runtime to tie in with my ideas about SpendOps (blog post pending 😀). Hopefully we get to catch up again later in the year at the Serverless Days conference here in Melbourne
• Matt Henderson - Program Manager for App Service and Azure Functions. I really enjoyed talking to Matt about his Mixing Stateful and Serverless session.

The event went for 3 days and there were 180+ sessions to attend! It was impossible to attend all the sessions that I wanted to. Quite often there were multiple sessions that I had an interest in but they were held in different areas at the same time. I had to start making difficult decisions on which session I wanted to attend and which sessions to miss out on. At the main hall there were lots of projectors broadcasting the sessions in progress. You could grab a headset, sit down comfortably and have your laptop open, and tune into a session.

Thankfully, Microsoft recorded all the sessions for us to watch later. Simply go to the Microsoft Build 2019 website to view the sessions and get the slide decks.

This morning I re-watched a couple of sessions on my XBOX ONE while scrubbing through the PowerPoint slides on my laptop :)

Oh, there was also lots of swag and stickers 😀

Announcements

There were so many announcements at Build 2019 that would make it very difficult to cover all of them in detail. I’m going to cover only a few of the announcements that I personally found exciting and useful to my everyday development life.

1. Azure Functions - Dependency Injection
2. Durable Functions v2.0 (alpha preview) - Durable Entities
3. KEDA - Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling
4. SQL Database Serverless (preview)
5. .NET 5

Sessions

I attended as many technical sessions as I could and they were all super useful. The presenters were all well prepared and energetic, and I learned something useful from each and every session.

Here is a list of sessions I attended or watched from the main hall:

Web Development

BRK3017 - Full stack web development with ASP.NET Core 3.0 and Blazor

THR2003 - Serverless web apps with Blazor, Azure Functions, and Azure Storage

CFS3003 - Build Scalable APIs using GraphQL and Serverless

CosmosDB

BRK3053 - Building event driven apps with Azure Functions and Azure Cosmos DB change feed

BRK3054 - Best practices for Azure Cosmos DB: Data modeling, Partitioning and RUs

BRK4005 - Deep dive: Mission-critical multi-tenant apps with Cosmos DB multi-master

BRK4004 - Real-time Analytics with Azure Cosmos DB and Apache Spark

Azure Functions

THR3011 - Mixing Stateful and Serverless – workflow, orchestration, and actors

BDL2012 - Mind blowing serverless updates with Jeff and Eduardo

BRK3041 - Event-driven design patterns to enhance existing applications using Azure Functions

DevOps

BRK3028 - From Zero to DevOps Superhero: The Container Edition

BRK3039 - End to end application development and DevOps on Azure Kubernetes Service

CFS3006 - Deploying local bots with Bot Framework and LUIS Docker containers

Thats a wrap!

There are so many more computing and technology announcements at Build 2019 that would get people excited. So please go and have a look at the online sessions. There is more Azure, more AI, more Data, more IoT, more Mixed Reality… you get the idea.

Hopefully I can attend the next Build conference in 2020! It was a lot of fun and I encourage everyone else who has the means to attend this amazing event. It is definitely worth the time and money!

I give Build 2019: 💎💎💎💎💎 out of 5 gems!