9 awesome .NET conference talks you don't want to miss

Written by Thomas Ardal , December 04, 2018

How many conferences do you attend each year? Probably not more that one. While great fun, attending conferences is often time-consuming and just the fact that you are not coding scares some bosses away. Luckily, most conferences tape sessions and make them publicly available a month or two after the conference. This is a list of my favorite .NET, C# or Azure related talks that I've either experienced live or got recommended by friends. This post is part of our Learn about .NET series.

Solving Diabetes with Open Source Software & Hardware - Scott Hanselman

Scott talks about his personal experiences with technologies related to diabetes (being a diabetic himself). It experienced one of the best iterations on GOTO back in 2016. Scott felt crappy that day (caused by mini muffins!), which sort of underlined the need for improving life for people with diabetes using technology.

Another good (and much shorter) version is available here:

ASP.NET Core: The One Hour Makeover - Jon Galloway

When Jon Galloway talks, I listen. This talk from NDC Sydney 2018, is an excellent walkthrough of how to structure your ASP.NET Core applications. The template included when generating a new project through Visual Studio is very limited (which is probably should be) and cannot be used for anything real. Jon's approach is a must see before starting a new ASP.NET Core project.

C# Scripting in the .NET Core world - Filip W

I watched Filip give this excellent talk about C# scripting on NDC Copenhagen in 2017. I'm not using C# scripting in my daily work, but I'm amazed by the possibilities with writing scripts in a familiar language. Besides that, Filip is a great speaker.

An Opinionated Approach to Using ASP.NET Core - Scott Allen

Another excellent talk from NDC Copenhagen is from Scott Allen. Scott shares 50 opinions on how to structure ASP.NET Core applications. In that sense, the talk is similar to Jon Galloway's talk but contains a lot of best practices that I've used personally since watching the talk.

Consolidating Services With Middleware - Christian Horsdal

Christian Horsdal is probably one of the best speakers in Denmark currently. His Consolidating Services With Middleware talk from NDC London 2017 is one of the best talks about microservices and ASP.NET Core middleware I have seen.

The History of .NET - Richard Campbell

I've been in the .NET game since v2 and on the Microsoft wagon since QBasic and VB3 (yeah I'm that old). A lot happened since that, which Richard perfectly sums up in The History of .NET. The talk contains a lot of, to me, previously unknown and fun facts about the entire journey of .NET.

Blazor, a new framework for browser-based .NET apps - Steve Sanderson

I follow everything that Steve Sanderson is involved in. From Knockout to Blazor, there's a red thread throughout Steve's career. In this talk, Steve gives a perfect introduction to Blazor, the new serve-C#-in-the-browser web framework, based on WebAssembly. What I like about this talk is that Steve demonstrates much more advanced scenarios for using Blazor than the typically Hello World presented at conferences.

Writing Allocation Free Code in C# - Matthew Ellis

Matthew Ellis from JetBrains gave this sweet talk at Øredev in 2018. A good point from this talk is, that you don't need these optimizations until you need these optimizations. If you have tried having either memory leaks or excessive memory consumption once, you know how important knowing the underlying types and features are to writing good .NET applications.

The HaaHa Show Microsoft ASP NET MVC Security - Phil Haack and Scott Hanselman

I'll wrap up with a bit of a classic. Being presented back in 2010, this may not be the most updated talk about security in .NET web applications. But Phil and Scott do an excellent and entertaining job explaining different kind of exploits that, sadly, still apply today.

These are some of my favorites. Please get back to me with talks you enjoy.

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