Full Day Hands-On Labs

(Additional Fee Required. See Pricing Page for Details.)

Visual Studio Live! San Diego offers two instructor-led, pre-conference Hands-On Labs. Get intensive in-depth training to complete your conference experience.

These labs are Bring Your Own Laptop (BYOL). Attendance for each Hands-On Lab is limited, so be sure to sign up early to guarantee your spot.

HOL01 - Full Day Hands-On Lab: Xamarin and Azure: Build the Mobile Apps of Tomorrow – Introductory to Intermediate

Laurent Bugnion and Matthew Soucoup
Sunday, October 7, 8:00am – 5:00pm

It's hard to be a .NET developer and not have heard of Xamarin. It's now part of Microsoft's ‘Any developer, any platform' strategy, and allows you to write C# and F# code that runs on iOS and Android. Combined with the power of the cloud, you can easily build the mobile apps of tomorrow that your users will love. In fact, we are so sure you are going to love Xamarin we're going to teach you how build an app to share photos of happy Xamarin developers.

This hands-on workshop will take you from 0 to a fully working, cloud connected, AI powered mobile app. We'll get you setup with Visual Studio and the Xamarin tooling on either Windows or Mac, and connect up to emulators, your iPhone or your Android device ready to run an app. Once you are set-up, we'll cover the basics of Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms, then it's heads down writing a cross-platform app - using one code base for a fully-native app that runs on both iOS and Android.

The app we build will combine accessing device hardware using Xamarin plugins, AI for face and emotion detection, and cloud services like authentication and blob storage, all built using a serverless architecture.

Finally, we'll go from code to production ready, using Visual Studio App Center to build your app, monitor for crashes, gather analytics, and prepare you app for distribution. We'll even look at wiring up push notifications so your app can be notified when someone else uploads a photo.

By the end of the day you will have a production ready, AI and cloud powered mobile app.

Attendee Requirements:
You must provide your own laptop computer for this hands-on lab.

Laptop Computer Configurations

You can develop for Xamarin using Windows or Mac. However if you use Windows and want to build Xamarin apps for iOS, you need a Mac computer too. This is because of Apple restrictions and cannot be avoided. During the workshop, we will support the following configurations:

From a Windows PC:

  • Preferred: Develop for Android devices using a physical device connected through USB.
  • Develop for Android devices using an emulator running on the PC directly.

From a Mac:

  • Preferred: Develop for Android devices using a physical device connected through USB.
  • Develop for iOS devices using a physical device connected through USB.
  • Develop for Android devices using an emulator running on the Mac directly.
  • Develop for iOS devices using a simulator running on the Mac directly.

Keys to success:

  • Bring your own Windows PC and/or Mac PC to the workshop. Make sure to follow the instructions below for the Xamarin setup.
  • If you have one, we recommend that you bring your own Android or iOS devices to the workshop. This is the easiest way to test your application

For detailed instructions on how to setup your laptop prior to joining us in San Diego, visit https://github.com/jimbobbennett/MobileAppsOfTomorrow-Lab/blob/master/SETUP.MD.

HOL02 - Full Day Hands-On Lab: Building a Modern DevOps Pipeline with ASP.Net and Visual Studio Team Services

Brian Randell
Sunday, October 7, 8:00am – 5:00pm

DevOps is an organizational transformation that starts with people, process, and then products. It's a journey of continuous improvement that requires changes just about everywhere. As a developer, how can you embrace DevOps at a more technical level? You've heard you need to change the way you work with version control—trunk-based development? The idea of feature flags sound intriguing but how do you do it? Do you still need testers? How do you get to "10 plus deploys a day"?

It this all-day, hands-on workshop, Brian will break the day down into five parts where we'll start with nothing and end with an ASP.NET Core app and a SQL Server Database running in Azure with a full continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline managed by Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).

First, there will be a review on the current thinking on DevOps. Next will be the planning & tracking phase where the architecture of the app will be broken out and defined. Then the dev & test phase where we get feature flags implemented, CI builds working, manual and automated tests, and more. In the release phase, will look at how you create a deployment pipeline to multiple environments and how you validate a deployment after its release. Finally, the monitor & learn phase will cover analytics and user feedback and how you start the cycle over again.

By the end of the day you'll have your own VSTS account with a CI/CD pipeline configured, a deployed app, and the hands-on experience on how to build a modern ASP.NET Core and SQL Database solution that runs in Azure using VSTS.

Each attendee will need the following, ready to go, for the workshop:

  • A Windows x64 computer with Wi-Fi where you have local administrator rights
  • Visual Studio 2017 Community, Professional, or Enterprise with the ASP.NET, Database, and Azure workloads installed (additional specifics will be provided a month before the workshop)
  • A valid, active Azure subscription where you are an administrator
  • A Microsoft Account (aka a Live ID/Xbox ID)

Experience with C# coding and basic SQL Server knowledge required.

Attendance is limited.

Attendee Requirements:
You must provide your own laptop computer for this hands-on lab.