 I'm having some deja vu because it seems like we had a.NET conference a couple months ago, but we're having another one that's all about Windows. So join me with Beth Massey as we learn more about the upcoming.NET conference on this episode of Visual Studio Toolbox. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Visual Studio Toolbox. I'm your host, Leslie Richardson, and today I'm joined by Beth Massey, who is a product marketing manager on the.NET team. Welcome, Beth. Hey, thanks for having me, Leslie. Appreciate it. Sweet. Nice to be here. Or nice to have you here. It's always cool that I'm here. I mean, I'm the host, so what do you know? So word on the street is that there is a conference coming up that's.NET.conf, but didn't we just have .NET.conf like a couple months ago? What's going on? That's right. Actually, so we have it every year. The main three-day event happens every year, and from now on, it'll happen every November when we launch a new version of .NET. So it happened with .NET Core 3. We released in September 2019, but then we went on the every November release train. So now we're going to have every November. So last November, you're right, in 2020, we had .NET 5 in Washington, right? So that happens every year, and we've been doing it for a long time. So it started out in the community. Javier Lozano is still on the planning team. He started it 10 years ago. So last one was the 10-year anniversary of the main event. Now, what we started last year, though, is the series of smaller events that are just one day. So like the main event has an open call for content, and we run it like a real conference, basically, except it's always been a virtual conference. So it's a little easier for us to adjust to this pandemic situation, to be honest. Fair pretty setup for that. But we started a series of smaller events actually before the pandemic hit. It started in January last year. We did a focus on Blazer. It was sort of a test to just say, hey, let's just invite some of the community experts and get some product team members together for just a one-day thing. We had no idea how it would perform or what it would do. Well, it turned out it was actually a very successful event. We had a lot of viewers, and so we're like, hey, this is a kind of an easier version, like a little scaled-down version of Donut Comp. And people kind of understand what Donut Comp's about. And so we're like, let's call it focus on something, because you can do anything with .NET. And so it's nice to be able to focus on a topic for the day. So we actually started that last year. We had focus on Blazer in January. It was on January 14th. I remember we flew up there, and it was snowed in. We got completely snowed into the studio. So we ended up trying to bring all the speakers. No, literally couldn't come to the studio at all, so we had to bring all the speakers remote. We only had like half the speakers remote, and then the product team members come in the studio. Well, they couldn't even do that. Well, yeah, we literally were like, okay, we're going to have to go pick up the crew from their house in an SUV. So, okay. Then in March, then we planned one for March, and that was focus on Xamarin. So we were doing all the mobile development with Xamarin. That one was March 23rd, which was actually one day before Governor Inslee, the Governor of Washington State, shut down the state because of the pandemic. It feels like an eternity ago. Yeah, it feels like an eternity ago. It was like literally less than a year ago that that happened. Yeah. We didn't plan on traveling because we knew this was something we kind of knew this was going to happen. So I ended up staying home. Javier stayed home. Jeff stayed home. So we were all at home, except that James Montemagno was the host, and they did go into the studio, right? But we ended up calling everybody in remotely for that one, except we had a few like a skeleton crew. Then we did a third one, and this is full blown into the pandemic. We did a third one on microservices in July, and that was our first real test run of everything in the cloud. So we basically built a studio in the cloud. So instead of having these channel line studios, we created a big Azure beefy Azure VM running OBS, and we actually still at that, we didn't use StreamYard. We were using, I think we're still using Skype to call people into it. But it ended up being a super successful event, and we ran it through Learn TV, and that one is probably our biggest event that we've done. So they've been successful. So we've got another one coming up. We think we have streamlined the process, and it should like we almost like a cookie cutter blueprint of doing these events. As you know, you guys are using StreamYard. We're using like Learn TV, like to do the player. Everything's like pretty smooth across. Well, let's knock on it. It's a live event. So you never know exactly what's going to happen on that moment. But yeah. So we've got Windows. I got my screen up here. So if you go to focus.netconf.net, focus on Windows is happening on February 25th. I'm going to blow it, Leslie. This is recorded. So by the time Yeah, don't don't pay attention to the countdown here. It's a lot for you guys, but yeah, 15 days. So it's not the countdown. All right. So yeah, so we got basically some, you know, speakers, we got some speakers from the community and the product teams. These are guys are all working on, you know, making, you know, Windows desktop apps and Windows development awesome with.net five. So you could see a little bit about, you know, what is.netconf here and you can kind of check out our past events, which I just walked through all the content, the code, the slides, all the stuff that our speakers did in the past, you can grab here. It even the main event. This was the one you were mentioning in the beginning. That's the main.netconf 2020 where you can grab all the content there. But anyways, we've got a great lineup. We just announced or just maybe published the agenda. I haven't actually announced it. There's an announcement right now. The agenda. So we've got Scott Hunter and Alia. They're going to kick off the day with the welcome session, which is an hour long session. We're actually building that. It's like the keynote. We're building that right now. So a lot of, I can't tell you all the details because we're building it, but it's going to be pretty cool. We're going to focus a lot on, you know, the, the what's new in, in wind forums and WPF development on.net five. And then Kathy's going to come in there and she's going to talk about how to take your .net framework based apps and get them to .net core slash five. So there's a tool we're working on to help you do that too. So she'll kind of walk through the preview of this tool. Okay. So that's a little teaser on a slip out a little. We're going to have a little announcement there. Okay. So cool. Don't tell anybody. Okay. Then we, then we, you know, we figure we had a, we've had a ton of what's new in C sharp, right? We do a lot of C sharp content. A lot of, because we know we have a lot of C sharp developers. Yeah, a lot of visual basic developers. Right. So we said, you know what, on.net five that we've done a lot of work in visual basic to light up the visual basic framework. Like it has a, it has a whole development framework for building, you know, wind forums apps actually. So Klaus who actually used to be an MVP and now works for Microsoft is super passionate about visual basic has is going to be speaking with Kathleen Dollard on like taking full advantage of visual basic and what's new for visual basic developers on.net five. So hopefully that's an appreciated. Yeah, that's really cool. Cause I mean, I get questions about visual, visual basic on my day job sometimes too. And I'm like, shoot, I feel like that's like the underrated language but I select to be used and it deserves some more love. It's very close to my heart. People might know me from like, you know, 20 years ago, I, I was like a huge visual basic developer when I was hired by Microsoft. I was a, you know, a visual basic developer advocate. And, you know, I, I, I definitely love VP is always be close to my heart. I don't really code anything anymore because I'm in marketing, but you know, so we got some, you know, Sam Vasu from progress teller is going to come in and show us how to use Azure signal our service with your desktop apps. So I think a lot of people think like signal are, you know, that's a, it's a web, web, you know, real time communications, web communications protocol. I don't, I don't need that from a desktop app. Sure. There's a lot of scenarios where desktop apps can, you know, take advantage of this as well. Right. I mean, you know, your stock trading apps and those kinds of things right, you know, that have really rich, rich UIs and are built native on native platform like windows and can totally take advantage as well. So he's going to talk to us about setting that up. The cool thing about Azure signal our service is it's a total turnkey service. You don't have to host it or do anything yourself. So that's really cool. Jessica Engstrom is a Windows developer MVP. And she is all about UX. So she's going to talk to us about some UX principles and how, how we can as developers, we kind of struggle and suck at building great UIs, what we can do to, you know, build better UI, right? And usability in general. So then we'd like to meet your friend, you know, he's probably coming to talk to us. Yeah, I know Dimitri. Lot of, he's working on, he's basically the XAML tool guy, right? So he's going to show us some of the new enhancements in BS for building XAML based WPF and UWP apps in Visual Studio. So this should be pretty cool. So I'm going to pivot you for a second. Yeah, so like obviously people should definitely check out this conference, especially if they're into Windows apps and Windows desktop apps. But what if people want to be able to have a say in what the next focus conference events are, what should the point? You know, I, I, what we, how we usually do it is this one was based on feedback that we got from a survey that we did at the end of the last conference, the main event. And we looked and saw, you know, the people love the main event. It was, it got really good, you know, good feedback from that event. But I saw some comments around, it would have been nice to have more Windows content because it was really web heavy, right? And I, I, I felt like looked back and I'm like, Hey, we did a blazer event that we did microservices. We did a mobile thing. But like, yeah, we haven't done anything for Windows developers. And so it was sort of, this was already pretty much based on the feedback that we got from a survey on the last event. So I would say, you know, you can add Beth Massey me and I take that as feedback too. You know, as the executive producer of Donik Hoff, I do take feedback that way, but we'll also send a survey out and join the mailing list. So if you subscribe to notifications just down at the bottom here, that just puts you on a list that anytime we have another .net conf or survey or asking for feedback, they just email people and then they fill out the survey and then we know what to do. And then a lot of times it just, it coincides with something we're doing in the product too. Like we've like blazer, for instance, was newly released at the time blazer server was and we were working on the web assembly. So it was kind of like right in between. And we saw just a ton of people like, you know, asking questions about it and how do I use this thing? And so we kind of, we've kind of provided these as scaling events. And so we want to, we kind of just look and see like, Hey, what's the community doing and asking questions all up. And then we pick, you know, so it has a lot to do with, it has a lot to do with feedback, but it also has a lot to do with marketing as well. And what, what, where do we want to drive people next based on what the product is? You know what I mean? Some of the things that I don't think other people, like people know about, you know, Windows is our least windforms and WPF is that they're open source. They've been open source for like over a year, right? And so we're going to bring in some contributors from the windforms and WPF projects to talk about how people could actually get started contributing in general on GitHub or to those particular projects as well. So it's not always like our, you know, shiny web technologies that are open source. It's actually like these like mal windforms is like 20 years old, the framework, right? And, you know, to actually take something that wasn't initially ever meant as an open source, you know, project to actually get it open source was actually an accomplishment in itself. And now the community contributed to it is even, even more rewarding. Let's put that way. So we'll have some of those books on as well. So I hope that we, you know, take a look at the agenda. Like I hope that we've covered a lot. Like the, you'll see like most of the content is about what you can do today. But we do have some future sessions. Like if we look at kind of the end of the day, here we go. We'll building.net hybrid apps with Blazor. We'll talk about, like Dan Roth will come in and we'll talk a little bit about hybrid apps. They're using, you know, they're native apps that use web technology. So if you want to use more of a web webby syntax or Blazor syntax to do native development, he's going to show us where that's come, where that's going and what it'll be like, the experience will be like in.net six. We've got someone, someone from the Windows team. About project for union, right? Project for union is about, you know, making that experience a lot better. And across, you know, all the different Windows 10 versions and basically building one app that can take advantage of all those devices. And then we'll have Maddie and David in to give us an update on the Donet multi-platform app UI, Donet Maui, which is in preview, I think very well, and actually by the time this airs, I think it'll be in preview. One will be dropped. And yeah. And so by the time we release November, it's a new app model for building apps that not just not just mobile apps, but also desktop apps as well, all native applications using XAML. So hopefully we'll, we'll have a good show for you. Yeah, that sounds great. And yeah, hopefully people go check out that site, get hyped about all the different talks and all the different ways that get involved in the, with the community as a whole. Don't forget the swag. We do have. Oh yeah, the swag. Free digital swag, right? So take a look at the swag. So we got free digital swag. We got a digital code theme. We've got like, you can create your own little bot. We also have sponsors. Our sponsors are sponsoring a bunch of swag this time. So this is the first time you're doing swag for a focus event. This is kind of, this was swag bag was really popular for the main event. And so our generous sponsors are donating 25 different prizes. So you'll have a bag of stuff basically. So you can enter to win, uh, right here and back stuff. Yeah, especially the mystery prize pack. Apparently progress did that last time and they're like, people love the mystery prize. I personally hate mystery surprise packs. I don't know what I'm getting myself into. Like, I want to know what I'm getting, but you know, teach their own. And I'll have items in the, in the stores that people can pick from, you know, more t-shirts and that kind of stuff too. So hopefully we make it fun. Awesome. So February 25th is the magic date starting at, starting at 8 a.m. Pacific. Great. So thank you so much for coming and sharing that. I think that is super cool. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who would love to have a full conference of nothing but windows apps and both desktop and mobile and beyond. So that's really exciting. And yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me. Yeah. And remember February 25th. Don't look at the countdown on this video is wrong. It's the date. Yep. All right. And with that, happy coding.