We give a lot of presentations at conferences and user groups. Interested in having Gill Cleeren at your next event? Great, let’s talk! Here’s a list of sessions we are currently presenting around the world.

Xamarin

Building a mobile enterprise application with Xamarin.Forms, Docker, MVVM and .NET Core

Mobile applications are getting more and more complex and the requirements for apps change all the time. It’s vital that we build a flexible and modern architecture, both in the app as well as in the backend. Amongst others, this means that applications need to be built out of several, smaller components that work together seamlessly.

In this session, we will explore an end-to-end architecture for building a modern enterprise mobile app and its backend. The app is built using Xamarin.Forms, based on the MVVM principles. This results in clear separation of concerns and promotes loose coupling, making changes to the functionality easier to test and implement. On the backend, the application talks with a microservice-based API, built with ASP.NET Core and hosted with Docker.

After this session, you will have a good idea how you can create modern mobile apps .

Note: can be a 2-hour talk!
Level: 300
Audience: mobile developers

Advanced Xamarin.Forms development

Xamarin.Forms is a great framework which allows us to build cross-platform apps with tremendous speed. The platform does have its limitations though. Microsoft has been adding numerous additions to the platform lately in order to allow creation of all experiences that we may wish for. In this session, Xamarin MVP Gill Cleeren will take you through the new (and older) approaches to build the UI you want (and need). We’ll cover renderers, effects, behaviors, native control embedding and much more.
Level 300
Audience: mobile developers

 

Xamarin apps and the outside world

No apps can work without services. A weather app, a Line-of-business app, even a game needs to store and retrieve data and all of this goes through services. Cloud platforms such as Azure are increasingly playing a more important role to deliver data to apps as well.

In this session, we will explore how Xamarin apps can connect with a wide variety of services to do all kinds of data-related operations, from simply storing data over streaming data to receiving push notifications. And all of this in a cross-platform way of course!
Level 300
Audience: mobile developers

 

Building your first real-world Android app using Xamarin in just 60 minutes

Do you have a great knowledge about C#? Maybe you’ve already built a great mobile app on Windows Phone or Windows 8 or even Windows 10? Would you like to be able to use your knowledge to build an Android app without having to resort to other languages or IDEs? This is possible using Xamarin!

In this session, Gill Cleeren, Xamarin MVP, will take you through the creation of your first Android application: Joe’s Coffee Store. Along the way, you will learn the basic concepts of Android such as Activities and see how we can use these from Xamarin.Android. We’ll need to connect with services to get access to data and we’ll learn how to navigate in the app. You’ll see we can do this all of this directly from Visual Studio. We will finish the session by looking at how we can deploy the application to the Google Play Store so it’s ready for our users!

You’ll walk away wanting to port your code to Android!
Level 300
Audience: Developers, mobile developers

 

Building your first real-world iOS app using Xamarin in 60 minutes

Your task before coming to this session: know C# and .NET.

Your mission during this session: learn how you can leverage your C# knowledge to build iOS apps.

If you decide to accept this mission: be prepared to see how in just 60 minutes, a complete iOS app will appear in front of you. All using C#.

This session will destroy itself after 60 minutes.
Level 300
Audience: Developers, mobile developers

 

An introduction to cross-platform development with Xamarin

Cross platform development is what many business consider as the holy grail. There have been many attempts over the years and all have their flaws. One of the major problems is that many solutions require learning a new language and skillset, while that is often – if not always – the most valuable asset.

With Xamarin, it becomes possible to re-use C# skills to build iOS and Android applications and on top of that, re-use much of the code base for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps. In this introduction session, we will take a look at how we can build apps using C# which run on all platforms. We will also take a look at the different code-sharing strategies which we have available, including PCLs, shared code and more. With Xamarin, development can be done from Visual Studio as well as from Xamarin Studio; we’ll show the different options here as well.

After this session, you’ll have a good overview of what Xamarin can help you with and also what are the different building blocks of the platform.
Level 200
Audience: Developers, mobile developers

 

Visual Studio & C#

Power to C# Developers: learn what’s new in Visual Studio 2017 for C# developers

Visual Studio 2017 improves every .NET developer’s favorite IDE. Together with C# 7, they make an awesome combination. In this session, we will take a look at the new features of the IDE and the new features of C# that will really improve the way we work. We will explore the new debugging features, see what was added in C# 7, learn about the new unit testing features and much more!
Level 300
Audience: Developers

 

Web

Building a RESTful API with ASP.NET MVC Core

ASP.NET Core is the newest version of the MVC framework. It is by far introducing the most radical changes to the .NET framework, including the ability to run our apps cross-platform. In this session, we’ll use this new version to set up a real-world API. You’ll learn how we can set up the API, how you can version the API, how you can add caching and of course, how you can add secure the API. After we’ve written the API, we’ll want to deploy it. We’ll see how we can use Windows Azure to do so.
Level 300
Audience: Developers, web developers

 

Building your first ASP.NET Core MVC Web application from start to Azure

After 15 years of ASP.net, Microsoft has introduced the most radical change to the framework with the introduction of ASP.net Core. ASP.net Core is a complete new framework in which many concepts have changed.

In this session, you will see how you can build a fully working website with ASP.NET Core. This will be a very demo intensive session; we’ll start from File à New Project and you’ll see how we’ll publish our fully working site to Azure by the end of the talk. Along the way, you’ll get an understanding of the model and database using Entity Framework Core, you’ll see the new Controller model and the new routing engine and you’ll get an understanding of how Dependency Injection has become an integral part of ASP.NET MVC.

You’ll walk away with the understanding of how a real-life ASP.NET MVC app is build. The code you’ll see (and be able to download) will be your guide for your next ASP.NET Core MVC project.
Level 200
Audience: Developers, web developers

 

Building enterprise web applications with ASP.NET Core MVC

ASP.NET Core MVC is ready for prime-time. The new version of ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Core MVC, brings many new features that enables developers to build secure and, scalable enterprise-ready web applications. In this session, you will learn about advanced tag helpers, logging and diagnostics features, performance enhancements, identity and security risks and much more. We will end the session exploring how we can automate ASP.NET Core deployments to Azure with VSTS.

After attending this session, you’ll be ready to create real-world enterprise applications with ASP.NET Core MVC.
Level 300
Audience: Developers, web developers

 

Bootstrap 4: the full overview

Are you struggling to create a consistent user interface for your web app? Don’t want to bring in too many expensive designers? Take a look at Bootstrap, the awesome web framework!

In this session, you’ll get the complete overview of the Bootstrap platform. We’ll see how the Bootstrap layout elements to create responsive UIs. We’ll explore how we can create nicer looking elements such as buttons and include components such as the navbar, menus and much more!
Level 200
Audience: Developers, web developers