When you attend conferences, especially successful ones, there is this moment when the show floor closes, the session rooms are emptied, the attendees and the staff starts heading back home... This brings an eery feeling, increased by the tiredness (exhaustion?) of the last few days. We refer to it as "post-conference blues". This used to hit me hard, but in time I learned to deal with it. Not rushing back home helps, instead taking an additional night to rest, reflect and explore the local city.

So here we are. On theast day of the conference, we still had labs from 9 to Noon, and I was very positively surprised by the attendance. This finished the official conference business on a positive note. In the afternoon, I did a bit of shopping, then went to rest and take a nap, and then had an awesome steak dinner (I had surf and turf) in a historical building near my hotel, hosting the Harry Caray's Italian Steakhouse.

So let's talk about the various moments of the conference, one week later, now that I had some time to rest and reflect.

You can see the full list of our instructors-led labs here!

As I am writing this, I am on my way to the Zurich airport for the trip to Chicago for Microsoft Ignite 2024. I am really impatient to see the result of months of planning and toiling to make this happen. Every such gigantic conference is the result of team work from hundreds, even thousands of workers. We started planning Ignite already before Build was being run in May 2024. 6 months later, countless meetings, countless hours of coordination, and here we are, ready to deliver our biggest post-pandemics conference so far.

One year ago, I was walking around at the Taal Vista Hotel in Tagaytay and had the pleasure of bumping into Joel Dolot who was wearing a Microsoft jacket. Joel is a professor at the Lyceum of the Philippines in Batangas City, a renowned technical university. I introduced myself as a Microsoft advocate, and we kept in touch ever since. While planning on our next trip to the Philippines, Joel and I got in touch again and talked about organizing an event for the students.

This event took place yesterday in Batangas City, one of the larger cities in the south of Manila. It was an immense pleasure to be hosted there. The staff went all in to make us feel welcomed.

All the material I presented can be found on my website.

Starting immediately, I will not be sharing content to Twitter anymore. My followers can see my content on a number of platforms, including LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads and more.

All the options to contact me are available on my About page.

It was a good run while it lasted. I joined Twitter in 2008 and it really helped me with networking and making new friends. But it's just not tenable anymore.

I hope many will join me on the other social platforms!

Happy coding!
Laurent

Very excited to announce that together with GitHub's April Yoho, I will be presenting an online session titled "GitHub and Azure, Better Together" .

This session is inspired from our recent Learn Live in-person session at the Azure Lowlands conference. But this time it is online, and everyone can watch it live.

April Yoho and yours truly will show you how to use some of GitHub's features to automate Azure deployment.

You can register here for this webinar, which will take place on Wednesday, September 11 at the following time:

• UK time: 11:00AM
• Central Europe time: 12PM (Noon)
• US Eastern time: 6AM
• Israel / Eastern Europe time: 1PM

Hoping to see many of you in the chat!
Happy coding,
Laurent

I just had the immense pleasure of speaking again at the excellent .NET Day conference taking place at the Sihlcity movie theater in Zurich, Switzerland.

I've been a frequent speaker at this conference for the last few years and always enjoy coming back. There is a great audience (it was sold out again), concrete questions, good food and generally a great mood. Of course it doesn't hurt that it takes place about 30 minutes away from my house :)

My session

My session this year was titled "Making the best out of AI in your daily work life". For those of you keeping tab, this is strongly inspired from the similarly-titled keynote I recently gave in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Since then, a few things changed, most notably Azure Open AI is now open for everyone and you don't have to ask for access anymore.

As always the session's material is available on my website. The session wasn't recorded but you can find the slides and resources at https://gslb.ch/746.

Today I celebrate 7 years at Microsoft. I remember my first day very well, which actually took place on my second day 😊 Indeed today is Switzerland's national day, and a public holiday. Which means that even though my contract started on the 1st of August 2017, my first effective day, and the New Employees Orientation (NEO) took place on August 2nd, 2017.

Shortly after I started, I flew to Seattle to meet some of my new teammates, including my former manager Tim Heuer. Back then our group was part of APEX and the logo still can be seen on some of the swag I got back then. We don't use that anymore though 😊

The APEX logo

This morning, I pushed publish on a new post on the Visual Studio blog. This refers to a video created by my amazing colleague Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza, which lists 20 shortcuts to be used in Visual Studio.

Gwyn explains in just 5:34 how to be more productive in Visual Studio by using convenient shortcuts.

Did you know that some complex shortcuts are called chords? Just like on a musical instruments. I always found this a very nice parallel...

More resources

If you want to learn more about keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio, here is a list of resources for you:

• The Visual Studio blog article I wrote about the Ctrl-L and Ctrl-Shift-L shortcuts.
• Gwyn's video on YouTube.
• A convenient list of shortcuts on Learn.

Happy watching!
Laurent

I took a moment last week to write an update to my Cloud Advocate profile. Each cloud advocate at Microsoft gets a public profile like this, and mine was quite out-of-date, so it's current now!

Check it out here 😊

Happy coding
Laurent

I recently had a puzzling error in one of the Function apps I am using to manage the content I create (pictures and videos). This app is a combination of Azure Functions, Logic Apps and a Blazor front end running on a Static Web App.

As usually, I developed the Function app in .NET/C# on my Windows machine, and deploy to a Linux Function App. Linux is cheaper and generally very well suited for Web workloads. Since .NET runs seamlessly on Windows and Linux, it often makes sense to develop apps on Windows (where we can enjoy the versatility and power of Visual Studio) and to then deploy it to Linux for production.

In some cases however, this can cause some minor headaches, like described below.