Impressions of .NET Developer Days 2023 Conference

Published in

Volosoft

5 min readNov 3, 2023

In my previous post, I wrote my impressions about NDC Porto 2023 conference. And this time, we wanted to attend one of the most popular .NET conferences in Europe 👉 .NET Developer Days. I’ve been a .NET developer since .NET Framework 1.0, and we, as the core team members of the ABP Framework have always been working on the .NET technologies. The .NET Developer Days conference is a pure .NET-focused conference, and we couldn’t stop ourselves from this amazing opportunity to meet .NET fellows there. Then we flew from Porto to Warsaw / Poland. This was a five day event. One day before the event and one day after the event, there were workshops. The actual talks were on 24 and 25 October.

The place was really huge. This is the first time I’ve been in such a big conference. The venue is called Expo XXI. It’s the biggest tech conf in Central and Eastern Europe dedicated exclusively to the .NET platform. There was a variety of food, chill-out places and entertainment areas. And the session rooms were also big, you can see how big it’s in the below picture.

.NET 8 is coming up

As you know, .NET 8 is coming up, and Microsoft is making announcements and promoting this new version. Therefore, the kickoff was made with Scott Hunter. His keynote speech topic was “Building and Scaling Cloud Native Intelligent Apps with .NET 8”. He showed the new features in .NET 8, C# 12 and the new AI Copilot tooling. He mentioned how to use these new features to build Cloud Native microservices. You can see how packed the room was, and even some fellows were standing ☺️.

Scott Hunter’s giving his keynote speech

Over 800 visitors

Over 800 visitors physically attended! This is a very good number for .NET conference. More than 30 talks were executed with 20 great speakers.

.NET Team was also there

As it’s a .NET developer conference, some dear Microsoft employees were focusing on the new upcoming version .NET 8, like Scott Hunter, April Edwards, Safia Abdallah, Mads Torgersen and Stephen Toub.

C#’s functional journey

The second talk I joined was Mads Torgersen’s talk. It was about “C#’s functional journey”. He started a code snippet from the .NET Framework’s first version, and he step-by-step updated the code according to the latest .NET version. Hence, we saw how .NET evolved within its two-decade history.

Building a web framework from scratch

Next, I joined Safia Abdalla’s session. She built a web server (framework) from scratch. It was a very useful talk to understand how a web server like Kestrel works in basics. You can find the final code on her GitHub 👉 https://gist.github.com/captainsafia/c3847b73c3a06f91a96f57bd2e70592a

Game changer: Dynamic PGO

Then I entered Stephen Toub’s talk. I always see his blog posts about .NET performance improvements. And sure, this time, his topic was “Performance Improvements in .NET 8”. If I need to summarize this 1-hour talk, you must enable Dynamic PGO (Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization) in your .NET application. He says it’s a GAME CHANGER in .NET 8, and it is a crucial PR in all of .NET 8 PRs… If you’re interested in this enhancement, check out this Reddit thread. I also suggest you read this post Performance Improvements in .NET 8, by Stephen Toub.

Q&A panel with .NET Team

Next, I listened to the .NET team’s Q&A Panel. People asked questions to the team from their conference mobile app and they tried to answer them. Richard Campbell was managing the panel. In the below picture, you can see Mads Torgersen, @Stephentoub and Safia Abdalla.

The second day, I was in the Stephen Toub’s room again. You know, nowadays, async & await is being used widely in .NET apps, but many developers have only a limited understanding of how it really works. This time, Stephen showed “How Async/Await In C# Really Works”. He explained how it works at the language, compiler, and library level… For more information you can check out his blog post 👉 devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/how-async-await-really-works

*How Async/Await In C# Really Works* — Stephen Toub

Connect remotely like a pro! Hack VPNs

And finally, I joined an interesting session: “Connect remotely like a pro! Hack VPNs, avoid firewalls, connect even when your machine is down” by Adam Furmanek. We work from home, cafe, airport… Sometimes our connection can be unstable or we need to connect to multiple VPNs, or even the home computer can be switched off!!! He deep dives into hacking networks, finding workarounds to connect your safe (corporate) computer. It was one of the most interesting talk I’ve ever listened to. You can see his slides at Connecting_remotely_like_a_pro.pdf

*Connect remotely like a pro —*Adam Furmanek

Networking with other .NET devs

You can see the Twitter posts about .NET Developer Days at this link. And below you can find my video shoot from the conf area… I’d like to show you the atmosphere of .NET Developer Days 2023 in this video.

Watch the video from the conf area

Conclusion

That’s all from me! It was a very good opportunity to meet developers from Europe and listen to the inspiring talks. Lastly, I’d like to show you this nice view from my apartment window in Warsaw. You see the second-highest building in Poland and 6th highest in the EU >> Palace of Culture and Science >> designed by Soviet-Russian architect Lev Rudnev.