These are the sessions you need to attend at Ignite 2019

I know, I know. You still haven't waded through all the archived sessions from last month's .NET Conf and here I am talking about Ignite, which is only about a little over three weeks away.

Good grief.

Still, I'm going to do you a solid. I took the trouble to review the session list for Ignite so I could give you a curated* list that you will find interesting. Let's dive in, shall we?

Sunday, Nov. 3

This is the pre-event event, and I believe you have to pay extra to attend any of these all-day sessions, but I can't tell for certain at the moment because the website is hating on me.

PRE20 - Advanced techniques for modernizing your identity and access management from on-premises to the cloud with Azure Active Directory

As our customers explore moving from PowerBuilder, WinForms, or VB6 to a modern web architecture, one of the issues they have to resolve is authentication. Customers who already use Active Directory should check out Azure Active Directory to make that transition a bit easier.

PRE03 - Hands-on with GitHub and Azure DevOps: Go fast without breaking things

Mark Zuckerberg famously said "Move fast and break things" which sounds great until you consider the consequences, especially if you are in a china shop. Or writing code. Assuming you're still maintaining desktop legacy code why would you care about Azure DevOps or GitHub? Because a glimpse at what could be your future may make you more determined than ever to get there quickly. And WebMAP** can help.

Monday, Nov. 4- Fri. Nov 8

The actual event begins today so I think everything from here on out is included with conference registration. Again, YMMV. Some of these repeat so I'm covering the whole week.

BRK2251 - 2019 Global Cyber Risk Perception Survey insights

Cyber risk is too much in the news these days and so anything that might help you understand it and plan for it can't be a bad time investment. If you've still got legacy my best suggestion is to get off it and move those workloads to modern languages and runtimes.

BRK3136 - Azure Migrate: A deep look at your cloud migration journey

This appears mostly to be about moving your existing on-prem VMs up to Azure so you can ditch local hardware and support costs. Of course, if you're running XP on VMs this won't help you. Matter of fact, if you're still running XP you're beyond help. [Editor's note: Not true, Mobilize.Net can help!]

BRK2071 - Increase your .NET productivity with Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac

Visual Studio is like Photoshop--it's super powerful and super complex in that there are a zillion ways to do everything, and nobody knows as many as they'd like. So check this out to improve your productivity when you're slamming code.

BRK2081 - Keeping 600 million devices protected, productive, and healthy: An insider’s view of the Windows Update service

I might have to attend this one just to see if Windows will force an update during the speaker's presentation. That would be karma if ever there was.

BRK2084 - Windows Virtual Desktop overview

Microsoft is taking a swing at Citrix with their Virtual Desktops which we will be supporting so I suppose I should check this out. If you're considering pushing desktop apps to Azure this is one way to do it without migrating the code base, which of course we think is a better approach. Maybe they'll explain the pricing, which so far makes my cell phone plan look dead simple in comparison.

APPS50 - Taking your app to the next level with monitoring, performance, and scaling

Again, this is one for you whether you've done any cloud native apps or are still mired in the desktop. Going pure native on the cloud opens up a lot of doors that just aren't available to desktop apps. How about real time user feedback on features? How about app health monitoring? And more.

BRK3164 - .NET platform overview and roadmap

We started with .NET and we're all in on .NET and .NET Core. If you missed .NET Conf this is a good session to give you some guidance about where the platform is headed. Spoiler: it's all about Core.

BRK3147 - 45 life hacks of the Windows OS in 45 minutes

This promises to be one of those facepalm sessions where you question how you ever survived without knowing what Ctrl Shift RightAlt F12 Backslash NumKey 7 does.

THR3122 - C#8: Nullable reference types

Mads Torgersen does what he does best: explain new stuff in C# in a way even I can understand. Rather than the C++ approach of "We put this in to show how freaking smart we are," Mads is all about "here's a real problem that drives people crazy and so we fixed it." Love it.

BRK2073 - Create amazing web apps with ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core 3.1 is shipping in November, probably while we're all in Orlando, and it comes with coolness like Blazor, SignalR, and gRPC updates.

And Azure...

If you are at all interested in Azure or AI, Ignite is liberally sprinkled--ok, make that drenched--with content on these two subjects. It's no secret this is where Microsoft is stacking their chips on the roulette table.

And tee shirts

We've got a special shirt for Ignite and we're bringing a few extras to give away at the booth. We're also going to give away some amazing prizes like last year but better. Look for me wandering the halls or stop by Booth 1809*** and say howdy.

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*My boss hates this word so I have to use it just to irritate her.

**Shameless plug.

***The year Lincoln and Darwin were born, and when the Dutch king accepted the metric system. 190 years later and the USA is still measuring distances in feet and inches.