I am very pleased to announce the 2025 edition of Blazor Day. This amazing online conference is back! Organized by my dear friends Adrien Clerbois (Microsoft MVP), Christophe Peugnet (Microsoft MVP) et Denis Voituron (Microsoft), I am honored that they asked me to help and to be the host. The conference is online, and free of charge, so you should really register now!!

Quick post today to mention that I will be presenting a session titled "Creating a client-server application with GitHub Copilot" tomorrow (August 26th) at the .NET Day conference in Zurich. Make sure to come and say hi if you are attending!!

Update

The slides and demos are now available at https://gslb.ch/dotnetday2025!

Happy coding!
Laurent

Today is my 8th anniversary at Microsoft, and just like on my very first day, it's also a public holiday today (happy 734th birthday Switzerland...).

I've been through a lot of changes at MS since that day in 2017 where I decided to interview in Redmond, and then to accept the job. It's been, like they say, a wild ride.

For about 4 years now, I've been the happy user of a foldable phone. The current one (Samsung ZFold 5) is already 2 years old and still pristine. My previous one (Samsung ZFold 3) is still used at home, but I changed to the ZFold 5 after 2 years of using the ZFold 3, mostly to benefit from the enhanced camera.

In this article, I will show some tips to work on code with a foldable mobile device. It means that you can leave the laptop at home and still be productive on the road.

Disclaimer: I own an Android device (Samsung ZFold 5) and have no idea if what I show here works on iOS. I assume that some of these tips should work just find on iPhones.

On Monday, my colleague Jessica Tibaldi and myself presented a Microsoft Dev Box session at the AI Tour Lausanne. It was a fun session showing some of the basics of Dev Box, and then diving deeper in some of the new features announced at Microsoft Build in May.

The details of the presentation and the slides can be found here. Note that these slides are the slides from the Build session delivered by the Dev Box team. I added a recording of our AI Tour demos at the end.

Next Monday I will be in Lausanne co-presenting a session about Microsoft Dev Box in collaboration with my colleague Jessica Tibaldi.

The AI Tour is a suite of events that Microsoft is running worldwide. Some of these events are larger, some smaller, and allow us to be in person in cities where we don't traditionally have a primary conference such as Microsoft Build or Microsoft Ignite.

Microsoft AI Tour

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