Reserve your seat: .NET Sessions at AWS re:Invent 2023

Amazon Web Services will host its annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas from November 27th-December 1st. In this post, I’ll review the .NET sessions at re:Invent 2023 and opportunities to network. AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by AWS for the global cloud computing community. The in-person event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to 2,000+ technical sessions, the Expo, and after-hours events. For virtual attendees, there is a livestream of keynotes and innovation talks, and access to breakout sessions.

Once again there is a dedicated .NET track at re:Invent. The .NET track has 7 breakout sessions, 3 chalk talks, and 1 workshop. In addition, there are several .NET sessions in other tracks. You’ll find sessions for the .NET developer on everything from artificial intelligence (AI) to serverless to modernization.

Breakout Sessions

AWS re:Invent breakout sessions are lecture-style and run 45-60 minutes. AWS experts, customers, and partners present these sessions, which may include 10–15 minutes of Q&A. Breakout sessions are available for in-person and virtual attendees.

Build production serverless .NET apps with AWS Lambda (XNT301)

This session explores development and architectural best practices when building serverless applications with .NET and AWS Lambda, including when to run ASP.NET on Lambda, code structure, and using native AOT to massively increase performance. Join this session to learn how to develop, test, and deploy .NET serverless applications and gain a solid understanding of how to build production-ready, high-performance serverless applications.

Speakers: Craig Bossie, James Eastham

Boost your productivity with AWS Toolkits and Amazon CodeWhisperer (XNT304)

Learn how AWS can help you be a more productive .NET developer. Software developers are always asked to do more with less. You need to remove impediments that slow down your flow and reduce context switches that hurt your productivity. AWS Toolkits can help you stay focused in your favorite IDE. In this session, learn how you can access AWS services and deploy to AWS to test your project in minutes, without having deep knowledge of infrastructure as code. Also learn how the AWS Toolkits now bring you even more with Amazon CodeWhisperer. Explore how this new AI coding companion can help you get more done faster.

Speakers: François Bouteruche, Christopher Christou

Enrich your .NET applications with AI capabilities (XNT305)

Discover how you can supercharge your .NET applications with AWS AI services. In this demo-heavy session, learn how you can enrich your .NET applications with AI capabilities like natural language processing, language detection, and translation all using an AI-assisted code generator. You can also see how to build an end-to-end intelligent document processing application with .NET using AWS AI services.

Speakers: Alexander Dragunov, Prasad Rao

Lessons in modernizing monolithic .NET applications to microservices (XNT306)

You inherit a 10-plus-year-old .NET application with retrofitted features, and your mission is to rearchitect it to cloud-native services. Where do you start? How do you assess source code to understand the level of effort? How do you experiment while minimizing risks? In this session, explore modernization pathways to go from monolith to microservices on AWS. Avionté, a platform for staffing and recruiting, is transforming their single-tenant legacy .NET Framework application into a multi-tenant SaaS solution on AWS. See how they are adopting cloud-native architectures by decoupling large monoliths to reduce costs, improve service uptime, and accelerate feature deliveries.

Speakers: Odell Tuttle (Avionté), Rasheed Abdul, Runeet Vashisht

Modernize .NET apps at scale: DraftKings principles for success (XNT307)

In this session, discover how DraftKings safely made major changes in infrastructure and software in their fast-paced, growing organization, moving from .NET Framework on Windows to .NET Core on Linux and Kubernetes. Then, dive deep into how they utilized .NET Core’s “async all the way” combined with HPA on Kubernetes to make huge improvements in throughput at game day load. Learn about some of the key best practices DraftKings has implemented and how these technologies have helped simplify and standardize their CI/CD and developer experience for on-premises and Amazon EKS workloads.

Speakers: David Musicant (DraftKings), Chris Evilsizer, Manikandan Srinivasan

Test automation for .NET applications running on AWS (XNT308)

Software developers are required to rapidly develop new features without sacrificing quality. As software grows, building and deploying an increasingly complex codebase becomes difficult and error-prone. In addition, developers use cloud-based services as well as microservice and serverless applications that cannot be tested on their development machines. In this session, discover the different types of automated tests and tools you can use to test your .NET microservice and serverless applications. Also learn how to apply automated tests to create consistent and effective tests that support your project’s success.

Speaker: Dror Helper

Getting the most performance for your .NET apps from AWS SDK for .NET (XNT401)

The AWS SDK for .NET is critical for .NET developers building their applications using AWS services. This session goes beyond the simple examples of making requests to services and shows the advanced methods of using the SDK for .NET to maximize performance and reliability. In this session, learn about the many subtle features and tuning options that are not widely known and can have dramatic effects. These include features for tuning retries, timeouts, and HTTP client handling as well as features to customize the HTTP requests made by the SDK.

Speaker: Norm Johanson

Chalk Talks

Chalk talks are highly interactive whiteboarding sessions with AWS experts. Expect a lively technical discussion, centered around real-world architecture challenges, with a small group of experts and peers. These sessions run for 60 minutes (in-person attendees only).

Architecting resilient and highly available .NET workloads (XNT303)

Companies need to architect their workloads for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) to meet the application resilience expectations of their customers. In this chalk talk, explore resilient architectures, how to design for Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)/Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), and AWS tools and services to help you optimize your Microsoft .NET workloads. Regardless of where you are in your modernization journey, join this talk for strategies to make your applications more resilient while optimizing for cost.

Speakers: James DuHart, David Pallmann

Managing .NET dependencies: Strategies for migration and modernization (XNT309)

Explore effective approaches for managing .NET dependencies during the migration and modernization of .NET workloads. Discover best practices for hosting, upgrading, and automating dependencies to help ensure a smooth transition and maximize the benefits of modernization. Learn about dependency management tools and techniques, including package managers, versioning strategies, and automated dependency analysis. Gain insights into strategies for handling compatibility challenges, integrating with cloud services, and optimizing performance. Whether you are migrating to a new platform, upgrading to the latest .NET, or automating dependency management workflows, this chalk talk equips you with practical guidance to successfully manage .NET dependencies and streamline your application modernization journey.

Speakers: Craig Bossie, Pavankumar Kasani

Modern observability tooling for .NET applications on AWS (XNT310)

The architecture patterns used for building software systems has changed significantly over the last decade. Systems were easier to monitor when everything was a monolith running on workstations updating a single database. With modern applications, you are required to monitor hundreds of microservices running across different platforms containing virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. This significantly increases your monitoring needs to avoid lost time and revenue that are critical for businesses to function. This chalk talk presents observability tooling you can use to monitor your .NET applications on AWS to reduce costly downtime and improve end-user experience.

Speakers: Jagadeesh Babu Chitikesi, Paul Hoffmann

Creating an automated C# code documentation generator with AWS DevOps (BOA319)

Having well-maintained technical documentation can significantly enhance developer productivity. Automating the documentation generation process helps ensure that it remains consistently up to date, eliminating the operational burden of manual updates and mitigating the risk of errors. In this chalk talk, explore a solution that implements best practices for technical documentation, including a standardized structure, comprehensive version history, and cost-efficient hosting. This documentation is centrally stored with robust access controls and undergoes automatic updates with each code check-in. Hear about the team’s approach to building this documentation and how they utilized various AWS services in the process.

Speakers: François Bouteruche, Rohan Kachewar

Workshop

Workshops are 2-hour interactive sessions where you work in small teams to solve real problems using AWS services. Each workshop starts with a short 10-15 minute lecture by the main speaker, and the rest of the time is spent working as a group (in-person attendees only).

Modernize and optimize an ASP.NET app in 2 hours (XNT302)

In this workshop, as a developer for a fictional e-commerce company, you will learn to enhance their web application to reduce cost, scale dynamically, and improve operational efficiencies. You’ll be moving a sample .NET framework application to Amazon ECS Fargate using AWS modernization tools and AI-powered suggestions. You will learn to use the assistive tools to port to cross-platform .NET, create microservices, and deploy on ECS Fargate in just 2 hours. Don’t forget to bring your laptop to participate!

Speakers: Ashish Bhatia, Sunanda Saxena, Supporting: Pratip Bagchi, Rahul Chugh

Spotlight Lab

Spotlight labs let you practice with AWS Experts. An expert AWS instructor guides you step by step through a real-world scenario.

.NET workloads on AWS Lambda (TNC103)

In this lab, learn how to deploy, modify, and invoke .NET applications in the AWS Cloud from an integrated development environment (IDE). The .NET projects covered make use of the AWS Lambda service for a serverless architecture.

Speaker: Jesse Toporowski

Builder’s Session

These one-hour hands-on sessions have ten attendees and one AWS expert per table. Each builders’ session begins with a short explanation or demo of what you are going to build. There is no formal presentation. It’s just you, your laptop, and the AWS expert.

Secure & observe .NET containerized workloads on Amazon ECS on Fargate (PEX402)

In this builders’ session, explore how to both secure and observe your .NET containerized workloads running on Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate. Using the AWS CDK, learn how to protect .NET APIs against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources using AWS WAF. Also learn how to set up and configure AWS X-Ray using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to collect and send metrics and traces to AWS X-Ray to gain visibility into the web traffic for your application. You must bring your laptop to participate. This builders’ session is intended for AWS Partners.

Speakers: Carmen Puccio, Elamaran Shanmugam, Mikhail Shapirov, Adi Simon, Chris Zheng

AWS Village

The Expo at re:Invent includes the AWS Village, where you can talk with AWS employees and dive deep into products, services, and solutions with experts. Come visit us at the .NET kiosk to discuss .NET on AWS. We’re very interested in understanding your interests and challenges.

Next Steps

We hope you’ll join us at AWS re:Invent, in-person or virtually. Visit the registration page to sign up, and reserve a seat for the sessions that interest you.  You can find session details and scheduled times in the re:Invent Session Catalog. Search for XNT to see .NET track sessions or .NET to see all .NET sessions.