DEVintersection and IT Transformation 2017: What's new with Microsoft?

Wrapping up its fourth year in Orlando, DEVintersection and IT Transformation are two of Microsoft’s leading technology training events. The two events bring together Microsoft’s senior leadership, experts, software engineers and IT pros. Attendees are updated on everything new for Microsoft technologies, such as ASP.NET Core, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Windows 10, SharePoint and more in the open source world. With a new version of Windows Server coming soon and a shift toward open source technologies for business applications, DEVintersection and IT Transformation are the best way to find out what’s just around the corner. 

We asked Pluralsight authors and experts who attended this year’s events what they got to take in and what to pay attention to in the year to come. 

Don Jones

The most noteworthy event at this year’s IT Transformation was Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft Technical Fellow, unveiling the Azure Stack product. Azure Stack is a way of hosting a private piece of Azure inside your own data center, whether you’re an enterprise or a service provider offering cloud computing services to a specific clientele. Azure Stack will initially be available as a preconfigured hardware and software integrated solution from Dell EMC, HP, Lenovo, and eventually from Cisco with initial offerings including 4, 8, or 12 servers, with bi-annual updates to capacity coming after that.

Azure Stack is a unique entity in the world today. No other cloud provider currently provides an on-premises version of their cloud – and Azure Stack is literally the same software that runs Azure, adapted to run in a scaled-down, Windows Server 2016-based environment. It represents a unique opportunity not only for customers, but also for specialized service providers. It’s expected to be rolled out in mid-2017.

Dan Wahlin

DevIntersection provides a lot of great workshops and sessions covering cloud, web development, database, DevOps and more. If I had to pick a favorite session at the conference it would’ve been the one given by Ward Bell on RxJS, since it’s a newer technology that many people are trying to learn. He provided an excellent deep-dive into its inner workings.

RxJS can be used to work with streams of data. You can ask RxJS to give you distinct items as they’re received, map data to functions that can be used to format it in unique ways and easily merge multiple streams of data together. Bell also did a great job explaining RxJS Observables and different operators that can be used to work with and manipulate data. The session was especially valuable for people who were new to RxJS and its many features.

Jesse Liberty

One of my favorite speakers at DEVintersection was James Montemagno of the Xamarin/Microsoft team. He spoke on three separate occasions about Xamarin development. 

With the recent release of the Xamarin Live player, which allows developers to see live previews of their Android and iOS applications created in Visual Studio on a mobile device, Montemagno discussed how tools like this can better help developers create cross-platform applications and continuously integrate and deliver updates to their apps more fluidly. His infectious passion made his presentations especially interesting.

Eric Fisher

While there were a number of amazing announcements at this year’s DEVintersection, such as the new Azure Stack, Bot Builder SDK and the new .NET Standard 2.0, the session I found most valuable was Jeff Fritz’s ‘.NET Framework Improvements: Tips and Tricks.’

I learned that they added `.editorconfig` to Visual Studio and that using CodeStyle allows developers to set warnings and errors when code doesn’t follow a personalized set of rules. It was also great to see the Live Unit Testing feature in Visual Studio Enterprise that lets you see which tests break as you’re writing your code.

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