I didn’t know what to expect from this event, as it was much smaller than other conferences I used to attend and actually organized by 3 .NET geeks (more about them later ).

In today’s post I’d like to share with you my feelings about the event.  I’d also like to smuggle some topics that were covered during the sessions, so you can stay up-to-date with .NET performance world’s trends and dig into them yourself.

Sessions

There was only a single room in which presentations took place. For me it’s a plus, at least there’s no problem with choosing which talk to attend

Even though the conference was held in Warsaw, Poland, all talks (and generally the whole conference) were given in English. There were 7 sessions in total, prepared by 8 – both Polish and international – speakers.

Szymon Kulec – Born to perform – incorporate .NET Core performance

In the opening talk, Szymon started with demystifying performance aspects of .NET Core. We went through the topics like pinning and pooling, Span<T> and Memory<T>.  We’ve also seen some usage of Unsafe.As for “unsafe” types casting.

Generally, the talk was very well-organized. Speaker used a lot of interesting analogies in his slides, which made the presentation very interesting. Great start!

Alexandre Mutel – Behind the burst compiler, compiling .NET IL to highly optimized native code using LLVM

Alexandre took as for a bit different journey – he talked about Burst, which is a Unity’s compiler. It transforms IL into highly-optimized native code with the help of LLVM. It was a really interesting talk, which showed us how performance can be boosted even more, which brings much better experience e.g. in games developed using Unity. Alex also said few words about RyuJIT compiler, which currently fully operates .NET Core. 

The talk was very motivating. Looking on the amount of great job the guys at Unity are doing with Burst… was nice and interesting to hear that

Konrad Kokosa – The history of .NET GC customization – from (almost) nothing to (almost) everything

The last talk before lunch break was given by Konrad Kokosa, the author of Pro .NET Memory Management.  Konrad’s talk was – as the name tells us – about customizing .NET’s Garbage Collector. I’ve already mentioned in this post that GC can work in several modes, but this presentation showed me that there are many more possibilities for tweaking it. Except of going through all different GC modes, like workstations/server/(non)concurrent GCs, the speaker told us what are latency modes and VM hoarding.

However, what’s probably the most interesting from Konrad’s talk is that he’s been developing his own, custom GC implementation! It’s called ZeroGC and is available on GitHub. Its main goal is to provide the GC implementation which does nothing, except of allowing to allocate the memory. Very interesting, especially if you’d like to know what’s necessary to totally change GC implementation in .NET Core 2.0+ yourself.

The session was very good, I felt that Konrad is really into .NET performance topics. Which is not surprising

Łukasz Pyrzyk – Daily Performance Fuckups

First after-lunch talk was given by Łukasz, who served us with a bunch of .NET performance sins (or fuckups, as you prefer ) present in .NET developers’ life.  Among others, we’ve seen some interesting case-study based on Azure Cosmos DB and one of the issues the speaker and his team met while deploying the system based on it on production.

The talk was engaging and really “close to our everyday life”. It was practical and showed that even if we think we’re doing everything correctly, following the documentation and best practices, we may still meet a lot of problems no one would ever think of.   

Adam Sitnik and Andrey Akinshin – Powerful benchmarking in .NET

These two crazy guys – Adam and Andrey, decided to give a talk lead by both of them. The session was held in a form of conversation – one of the guys was asking the question, while the other was answering it. Quite interesting form, especially that both of them are really passionate about what they’re talking about, so it’s good they chose such clear organization of their talk

Guys told us how we should all measure the performance of our applications – of course using Benchmark.NET library. Honestly, it has really become a benchmarking standard in .NET ecosystem recently, especially that it’s supported by .NET Foundation.

The goal of Benchmark.NET is to allow the developers measure the performance (execution time and many more…) without taking care of creating proper sandbox environment or choosing correct number of iterations – the library does it all for us. It’s easy to start using it, however it offers a lot of possibilities. You can find more information on its GitHub repository.  Definitely worth knowing and checking.

Shay Rojansky – From zero to hero – the Npgsql optimization story

In one before the last technical presentation of the day, Shay presented behind-the-scenes of Npgsql, an open-source ADO.NET provider for PostgreSQL. The speaker also explained what is a lock-free programming and how to do it with connection pooling techniques.

The talk was information-rich and compelling. Shay is a charismatic and engaged speaker, it was very nice and motivating listening to his passionate talk.

Jarosław Pałka – We are all doomed, which is why, what we do can not be called programming

I didn’t know Jarosław before, but he’s a really cool guy – even though he comes from Java world!

Jarek’s talk was mostly focused on virtual machines, how they work and why we actually use them. The speaker is also very charismatic and engaging the audience. He explained basic VMs concepts based on his own EgoVM virtual machine. Slides from the talk (not sure if these are exactly the same ones, but it seems so) can be found here.

I enjoyed the talk and the speaker itself, it was a perfect end of the performance geeks day

Venue and organization

Last but not least, few words on the conference venue and organization in general. The Airport Hotel Okęcie, in which the Dotnetos Conference took place, was a very good choice. The event was rather small, compared to conferences like .NET Developer Days and that’s what made it really cool and cosy. The food was very good, both lunch and snacks/cakes available in the venue’s hall.

Another great idea was the form of voting for the talks by putting green, yellow or red cards into a box after each session. Easy, but effective – I saw a lot of people voting.

In the conference starter pack we got a linen bag and shirt with Dotnetos logo. Of course, the organizers couldn’t miss the Dotnetos tabasco sauce which we also received

Summary

Summing up, the Dotnetos Conference 2018 was a great event, with only high-quality speakers. I can’t even choose the best session – I enjoyed all of them.

Huge thank you to the organizers – Łukasz, Konrad and Szymon. Great job guys, we’re waiting for more!

If you’re interested in internals of .NET, I also invite you to check out my .NET Internals series

The post Dotnetos Conference 2018 – .NET Performance World appeared first on CodeJourney.net.

In today’s post I’m going to sum up the conference and the sessions I attended

Tickets and organization

I attended the same conference 2 years ago and that time the conference was free. This year (I don’t know how it was organized last year) the tickets were paid. Normal ticket costed 150 PLN (~45 USD). The organizers also offered tickets for students for 50 PLN (~ 15 USD). This shows that the entrance was rather cheap as for such a full-day event, also compared to some similar conferences held in Poland.

In my opinion, making the conference paid improved the event in general. I felt the talks were generally more concrete, given by some well-known speakers (also abroad ones). The whole event seemed to be more “cosy” than 2 years ago. There were less people, at least I felt so (not knowing the real numbers).

This year, the conference was held at Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź:

The place was OK in general, with two rooms in which the presentations were done – one downstairs, the other upstairs. The building is quite spatial and comfortable and in a good location.

There was just one downside of this venue – there turned out to be not enough places to eat. The stand-up tables were OK during the coffee breaks, but it turned out to be insufficient during lunch. All attendees started to take their plates and eat, but there were no places to sit down. It was quite difficult to eat in such conditions, so there’s a place to improve here. But come on, that’s not food what we came there for, right?

Sessions

Below I’m listing and describing my subjective feelings on the sessions I chose to attend from two simultaneous tracks available. The sessions included both Polish and English ones (in the schedule there was always at least one English session to choose at a time).

Mark Rendle – Cloud Native .NET

First presentation of the day, the opening keynote, was held by Mark Rendle. The title of his talk was “Cloud Native .NET”. Mark explained us what the “Cloud Native” actually means, mentioning and digging into concepts of microservices and Kubernetes. During the talk Mark was using the presentation system he implemented, which is slidable.io. What’s interesting, the system allowed to ask questions directly from mobile devices and few folks made use of this functionality

All examples and concepts Mark presented during his talk are available in the source code of Slidable, which can be treated as a reference for building web application in accordance with “Cloud Native” and its principles.

Tomasz Onyszko – application + cloud + security => what could go wrong!

I was a bit disappointed when I entered the room in which Tomasz‘s presentation took place, as the presenter made the disclaimer in the very beginning that we will see a lot of Azure during the talk. For the last 2-3 years I’ve seen too much of Azure on various conferences and meetups so I’m a bit fed up with it. Maybe it’s only my personal feeling, but I think that Azure is very fancy and extremely helpful for developers, but it’s not a thing that you can start playing with directly after the conference. Most of the services are paid and for sure worth their prices in an enterprise, but not easy to start working with on a development playground after work. I really like to see some sneak peaks of trendy technology or interesting aspects that I could focus on in software development, but I didn’t feel getting it after this talk.

The presentation showed few mostly authentication and security-related functionalities in Azure, which are for sure useful for administrators working on machines’ configuration. I didn’t really feel like I learnt something new and useful during the talk, however the presenter was very good and with a nice sense of humor, so for people interested in such topics and working with Azure on a daily basis I’d definitely recommend this session.

Rafał Legiędź – developing for mixed reality with Hololens

For me, Rafał‘s talk was the best one on the whole conference. He presented us with the basics of Hololens, including basic technical and construction details of the device and the most common usage cases of it. First of all, I was surprised that in contrary to popular belief devices like Hololens and not used mostly for having fun or playing games. It’s used for things like elevator maintenance or cars design and production process.

The presenter defined the two popular terms: VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) emphasising the difference between them. By the end of the talk, Rafał showed us how easy it is to start developing for Hololens with Unity and Visual Studio.

The topic of AR devices is very inspiring and seems to be developing rapidly. On the other hand, there are already a lot of real, deployed solutions that help manufacturing or banking corporations to build their products more effectively, which I was not aware of. I think this topic is really a future and will be an important piece of software development in the upcoming years, even though it may seem a niche for the moment. I really recommend everyone to get into the topic, even it may not be affordable for everyone – the cheapest, development Hololens set with no guarantee costs 3000$. However, there are some cheaper AR glasses slowly appearing on the market (can be bought for even 900-1000$), so it should become more available in the coming years. Nevertheless the topic is worth attention, as this technological stack is a completely different world, offering totally different possibilities than “casual” software.

Matthias Koch – become a productive .NET developer with JetBrains Rider

First presentation after the lunch break I decided to attend was done by Matthias Koch – a developer working for JetBrains on a cross-platform Rider IDE for .NET. Although the talk was very lively done, it was a step-by-step presentation of functionalities coming from ReSharper introduced into the Rider UI. I use ReSharper on daily basis so I knew most of the functionalities, however I learnt some new and useful ones

Apart from that, the Rider IDE didn’t seem anything special itself. Apart from being cross-platform I didn’t notice any big difference between using Rider or Visual Studio with ReSharper (assuming you work on Windows). Matthias mentioned that as Rider is based on JVM, the garbage collection is more effective than in VS, as it doesn’t need to stop all of the working threads during the collection cycle. Maybe it improves the performance of the IDE in some extent.

Michał Bartyzel – please, motivate me!

The talk by Michał Bartyzel was the one non-technical with a hope to get some new ideas of self-development or productivity. It was generally well-done, with the good sense of humor from the presenter included. Michał presented some set of non-obvious recommendations to get ourselves self-motivated including sleeping well, not being hungry when making important decisions or creation of non-TODO-lists. Some of the techniques he mentioned are familiar to me as you could read in my post about productivity.

Basically, Michał gave us some easy tips than can be extremely helpful in self-organization. Such recommendations may sound obvious and not worth attention, but I really recommend at least trying to introduce some of them – it really helps. Michał published the slides from his presentation (Polish only) here.

Ian Cooper – 12-Factor apps

The closing talk was done by Ian Cooper, software development geek coming from London and being in the programming industry for quite a few years The talk was concerning the concept of “12-Factor apps”, which is basically a set of principles that every modern, “cloud native” application should follow. Ian focused on few most important of these rules and showed us some code presenting these concepts. More details about 12 factors can be read on https://12factor.net/

The whole idea is definitely worth knowing, especially in the modern world when the web applications are required to be build in software-as-a-service approach. I think it was a very good, meaty summary of the day, encapsulating concepts that are currently very trendy and asked by the business. The Twelve-Factor App concept can be seen as a guide to build reliable, extensible and loosely-coupled software with low entry threshold for new developers. With the power of cloud and computation centers like Azure, which is now mentioned during almost every presentation :), I see it as a crucial set of principles to follow to be able to use the power of hardware we have (powered by robust software), to produce high-quality and scalable IT systems and applications.

Summary

To sum up, the conference was very good. It felt to be small, family-atmosphere conference with not thousands of attendees. The talks were generally high-quality. Even if some I decided to attend were not especially interesting for me, I’m sure these ones provided great value for people being really into the covered topics.

I definitely recommend the conference to all .NET (and not only!) developers and will surely attend again

The post GET.NET 2018 – Łódź edition appeared first on CodeJourney.net.

Day 1 – workshops

Breaking Apps Apart Intentionally – Visual Studio + Docker + Sprinkles of Azure = Modern Microservices (Alex Mang)

Here I need to mention one organizational drawback – we didn’t have any desks in the workshop’s room, which was quite uncomfortable – it’s always better to be able to have your laptop on the desk in front of you in order to write down some stuff or test things covered by the speaker. It was surprising as in the other rooms where the rest of workshop sessions were held the desks were present.

 

That is however the only dark side of this workshop. Alex hosted a very good session, explaining the containers concept using Docker, DockerHub, Visual Studio and Microsoft Azure. Maybe in the beginning the session was too “slidy” with a lot of architectural diagrams, but fortunately around the middle of workshop Alex switched to VS and PowerShell showing us several fancy features of Docker:

Day 2 – conference 1st day

5 unit testing facts I wish I know 10 years ago (Dror Helper)

The session’s difficulty level was defined as 200, which means it’s an “easy” one, however I really enjoyed it. Dror showed some basic, but very important concepts needed to start writing unit tests. Maybe it’s even more accurate to say he eliminated all of the most common excuses a lot of us (programmers) have to not write unit tests. Very important knowledge so to say

Slides were very good quality and the speaker himself is quite a funny guy

How Far Can ‘Serverless’ Actually Go? (Alex Mang)

Alex is a kind of guy I like – a bit american-styled speaker with appropriate sense of humor. During the session he explained and showed how to build an application using Azure Functions. Even though I don’t use Azure at all personally (just tried hosting few simple web apps) the topic is interesting showing how easy it can be to build serverless apps or services without setting up any infrastructure.

PS: The photo I’ve taken was even chosen as the photo of the day by Alex He is active in social media and I definitely recommend to follow this guy.

Adding history to CRUD (Dino Esposito)

Launching patterns for containers – it’s more than just scheduling (Michele Leroux Bustamante)

There were some issues with the demos Michele showed, but this happens to the best even

Building for the Future without Abandoning the Past (Jeff Burtoft)

Jeff is Microsoft’s employee and you can definitely feel that. Presentation was generally simple and lightweight, but well-told and properly organized. Jeff presented us with some techniques on how to start making our legacy apps/systems better without breaking the previous interfaces and backwards compatibility.

Q&A panel, DevTalk Live and a conference party!

After all 2nd day’s sessions were finished, we officially started a conference party. During this time we’ve had some delicious dinner, drunk few craft beers. In the meantime we took a pint and went for a Q&A discussion panel with all the speakers:

Few very interesting topics were covered during the discussion panel. I think that the most active speakers during the panel were Alex and Michele. Dino also added quite a few nice insights

After the discussion panel there was a 2nd edition of DevTalk Live hosted by Maciej Aniserowicz:

Day 3 – conference 2nd day

Past, Present & Future of C# Debugging (Alon Fliess)

Creating a real-world Xamarin application architecture using MVVM (Gill Cleeren)

Organization

Registration

I was privileged by attending the pre-cons workshops on Wednesday, which were held in EXPO XXI – the same place as the main conference the next day – and the registration process was held there. It was pretty well organized and took us no more than 10 minutes. The other participants who didn’t attend the pre-cons told me there were also no issues with the registration directly at the conference on Thursday. If this it true then congrats to organizers for eliminating last year’s huge queues

It was a very good idea – practical and useful gadget.

Food

Food was the same as last year – very good, huge choice, efficient service. Craft beers served during the conference party on Thursday were also really nice

Party

The conference party which I already mentioned was well-organized. We had a lot of places to sit – so we made a use of it and had a lot of veeeery interesting and inspiring conversations with other participants That’s a very important part of such events – networking with the others, getting to know their problems in their companies, businesses or life. I think this is one of the aspects in our programming community we are missing the most – meeting others, discussing and exchanging ideas and insights – not matter which company, country or programming religion you come from.

Summary

However, it was great to gain some invaluable knowledge, meet many new people and have a lot of great conversations. Thank you all for organizing and attending the conference. See you next time!

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