Two months ago from Ignite Top Highlights and Takeaways and Next
Microsoft Ignite 2018 is an annual technical conference dedicated to developers and IT professionals during 5 intensive days, starting from 24 September until 28 September at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, with a Pre-Day for MVPs and RDs on Sunday, September 23rd.
All participants are able to get their badge from the airport of Orlando MCO, or in the Orange County Convention Center with Swag.
More than 30.000 technologists, developers and business leaders representing more than 5,000 organizations joined the event and they were present the first day early to take the queue for the Nadella Keynote.
So, the five-day event is started with the Corporate Vice President and event host Julia White by opening the Ignite days and welcoming participants, followed by a keynote address by CEO Satya Nadella.
This year, Microsoft provided a press book for with a 27-pages booklet with all of it.
We will start by some of the key takeaways from the keynote opening day announcements:
1- Partnership with Adobe and SAP on Open Data Initiative for customer
Microsoft, Adobe and SAP entered into an open data partnership at Ignite. They will bring together customer data into a single package that will be running on Azure that will establish a data lake service on it.
SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen joined Nadella onstage to give more details about their partnership, they said: “to enable data to be exchanged and enriched across systems, making it a renewable resource that flows into intelligent applications.”
For more details, you can check this link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/open-data-initiative
SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen joined Nadella onstage to announce a new industry partnership between the three tech behemoths on the Open Data initiative “to enable data to be exchanged — and enriched — across systems, making it a renewable resource that flows into intelligent applications.”
2- Microsoft improve the security by an end of the use of passwords
To log into a business application using Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD), you will be able to use the Microsoft Authenticator app on iOS and Android and not a password. (for more details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/user-help/microsoft-authenticator-app-how-to )
The password is not always secure so this is a new way of authentication.
3- Microsoft Office 2019 gets smarter
New version with more features for Windows and Mac. Microsoft added a number of new AI tools to its Office productivity suite.
4- AI for Humanitarian action
As a partnership with the United Nations General Assembly meeting, Microsoft announced an action with a £30 million project in AI for Humanitarian that will run five years. AI will help to detect the disaster work more on the needs of children’s and refuges so they will work more on analytics and bot frameworks.
5- Windows Azure Virtual Desktop
Windows Virtual Desktop lets you run Windows 10 in the cloud, it’s a DaaS with an evolution of RDmi combined with multiuser Windows 10)
For more details: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-desktop/
6- Azure Digital Twins
This is a new generation of IoT, then, it gives more flexibility to model your IoT deployment in the cloud in term of relationships and interactions among people, places, and devices.
For more details: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/digital-twins/
7- Microsoft Teams
The user is able to start a background blur when making a video call, gets bokeh and meeting recordings with transcripts.
And for the future, they announced that Surface Hub 2 whiteboards will launch in Q2 2019.
After the keynote, you are able to assist to many rich sessions, and using your mobile apps, you can schedule and evaluate the sessions.
If you try to do you tour, you will find the Expo where you can find all Microsoft’s Partner and get some other Swag. In the Expo, we can join Theater Session, I was in Theater Expo 2 the next day to present my session.
You can find another place for communities, where we can find the MVP & RD community, Diversity and Tech, and Microsoft Tech Community. And from this place, I discovered the diversity and tech community, so, I tried to see their sessions and make some friends and I was interviewed to talk about my experience in Ignite as a Speaker.
Microsoft Mechanics
The Microsoft Mechanics Live was also back, live all week at Microsoft Ignite.
As an MVP, I was glad to be honored in Ignite and all MVP & RD were in the same place, a really big and valuable community all over the world.
And they announced the date of Azure Bootcamp 2019 that will be on 17 April 2019:
It was a great experience for me as an MVP a woman in tech to be in this event, I learned a lot from many sessions related to .NET or Xamarin or Azure, I tried to have an idea in Azure Certification Path. And it was my first time to have a session in Ignite so I will give an overview in the part about what I presented.
THR2106 — Modernize your web and mobile apps with cloud
This session was inspired from an old experience in development not automated and using an old architecture similar to spaghetti pattern where you can’t be able to maintain or the maintenance is really costing.
The presented storytelling was:
“Three years ago, I was close to a team working on a project, it was really complicated because the customer requested a backend part that will interact with an existent embedded application and send a notification to a frontend part that makes some update according to a specific algorithm and a mobile application for final users. To minimize the cost, they worked in a monolith approach but after six months of work trying to deploy manually they were enabled to maintain the solution.”
Maybe it’s easy to build a monolithic application but moving to a containerized approach ensure the maintainability, the security, the agility, and the costs.
And the cloud was an alternative in case that we want to go faster and with a minimum of Costs so I talked about the challenge of the Cloud:
“When we started talked about the cloud, it was facing a lot of challenge to ensure the availability for example but we started talking about Cloud Design Patterns as a new way of designing modern application regardless of your solution ideas.”
And to explain in a faster way (only 15 minutes), I prepared a template that includes two projects, uploaded in GitHub as a prototype reference to this session.
https://github.com/didourebai/MSIgnite2018
The app architecture consists of two parts and it is based on Azure App Services, the needs of building an application that ensures an elastic scale to handle bursts of users at different times.
-.NET Web API that we will deploy them on Azure Web Service or they can be deployed as microservices on Docker and a web application using Web API Core 2.1 and the frontend project was build using Angular 6, to interact with the database we demonstrated the use of two ORMs: Fluent NHibernate with Criteria APIs and Querying and Entity Framework 2.1.
- Xamarin.Forms mobile app for iOS, Android and Windows. (MVVP Pattern, Converters, HttpClient to consume the APIs), we used in the template the preview of Xamarin.Essentials that provides to the developers a cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications and the App Center to build, test on a real device and distribute it to beta testers.
The Azure platform as a service (PaaS) tools used in this sample are:
- Azure CDN: serves cache files like CSS and JS even static images, used to optimize page loading and reduce latency.
- Azure Active Directory B2C: allow the user to sign in the application as an identity management service that enables customization and profiles management.
- Azure Traffic Manager: it routes the request of the user to the hosted platform in Azure App Service.
- Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational cloud database service that provides the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility. In our sample, we used SQL Server and Postgresql.
- Azure API Management: used to publish APIs to external, partner, and internal developers to benefit from the potential of their data and services.
During the presentation, we start by the global architecture (Page 9 in the Deck) after explaining deeply every part of the architecture.
For more details, session is: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/66364
