Microsoft Ignite: Day 5

Ignite at Universal

Read my summary of all Ignite days:

 

So here we are at the last day of Ignite.

Yesterday was a great night – Microsoft closed the Universal Studio park just for the Ignite attendees, and it was awesome!

The photo above shows how the main building in the park looked like in the night – and in reality it was much cooler!

Free drinks and food, amazing rides, great music, and a lot of fun. I don’t think there are a lot of companies that can do that, and that’s a huge chapeau for Microsoft.

Now, as a result of this great night, the beginning of day 5 was a little bit… let’s say… laid back. The shuttles were quite empty, and it looked like everyone are having a hard time waking up. But that was well worth it.

Since the last day is a short one, and concludes on 14:00, there weren’t many sessions I’ve attended. Here they are:

Web Assembly in Blazor Glory (Jimmy Engstrom, Azm dev)

I didn’t plan going to this session, but after the Creating Amazing Web Apps with ASP.NET Core in day 3 that demonstrated, among other things, Blazor. I was intrigued and decided to shuffle my schedule and learn some more about it.

So first – about WebAssembly.

Simply put, with WebAssembly you can run almost any language in the browser, directly. No JS whatsoever. It just depends on that that there is a runtime for your language.

And almost all languages have WebAssembly runtime, including .NET, which its runtime is based on Mono.

So when running .NET in the browser, what actually happens is that the browser downloads some CSS & JS files, and then the Mono runtime (less that 1.2MB), and then – it can run .NET dlls. Just like that.

In this session we saw some demos of how all of this actually works, and I must say it’s quite impressive.

I still have my reservations about whether this concept (of WebAssembly) will gain traction, after all – the JS world is very mature and won’t be easy to replace, but for those who do not know JS – WebAssembly (and, for the .NET developers – specifically Blazor), this is a very interesting alternative.

I think the bottom line for the Software Architect is this – Blazor must be in your toolbelt. We must be able to make informed decisions about Blazor, and be able to explain the clients its pros and cons.

As for me – I’m definitely going to deep dive into it, and even create a pet project to get my hands dirty.

 

API Management for MicroServices (Tom Kerkhove, Codit)

This session was basically about the Azure API Management capabilities.

Now, since I’ve already have experience with the Azure API Management, I wasn’t sure I should go there, but decided for it anyway, so to maybe learn something new.

So there were some interesting tidbits such as using Azure Arc for API Management, and some discussions around policies, but all in all, I don’t feel I’ve got something new, which is not to say there was a problem with the session, it was actually quite good.

However, there was one point that I found myself strongly disagree with the speaker.

Towards the end of the session, when discussing Microservices best practices, he said that organizations should go first for monolith, because it’s easier to develop, and then, after the business has stabilized, to start rip it off to Microservices.

I couldn’t disagree more.

I have countless of clients that want to move to Microservices from monotlith, and for some of them the bottom line was that it was simply not worthwhile.

The monolith became such big and complicated, that dividing it to small, autonomous services, is simply impossible, short of full rewrite.

And that’s the main problem with the monolith-first paradigm. After all, life just happens, and the monolith, having its own life, will not stop developing. And before you know it, you’ve got to yourself a formidable piece of software that no one dares to touch.

So, indeed, starting with Microservices might take longer, but with the right design and architecture, the gap won’t be that big, and in exchange – you’ve earned yourself a modular software that is extremely easy to update.

 

That’s all, folks!

So that was Ignite, and it was great.

I loved it. The content was great, with a lot of diversity, the showcases were amazing, the celebration was awesome and the enormity of it all is incomprehensible.

That was my first Ignite, and something tells me it won’t be the last…

 

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Don’t forget to check out my courses:

The Complete Guide to Becoming a Software Architect

Rest API Design – The Complete Guide

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