Identifying common application vulnerabilities (from a code and execution perspective) (interactive, lab-based)

Understanding and experiencing the realities of attacking and defending applications (interactive, lab-based)

Remediating these vulnerabilities in your code (interactive, lab-based)

Assessing and prioritizing vulnerabilities using application and architecture context

Using OWASP ASVS to plan strategic approaches to reducing vulnerabilities.


Attendees will be expected to be familiar with the basic concepts of application security risk and its importance in software development.



1 Day

Fix the Flag  - Proactively Defending your software 

Security

We'll start with a working minimal implementation of an escape room with microservice puzzles that follow a typical naive implementation of a "microservice architecture", and see how they fail. From the failures we will see how each of the puzzles can be improved to be made more scalable and fault tolerant. We'll then explore some more advanced distributed systems concepts

Senior developers beginning to take steps into the world of distributed systems

Developers interested in learning IoT basics

Anyone that wants to learn how to make their existing microservices more scalable and fault tolerant

Introducing messaging via Azure Service Bus

What further patterns should attendees learn about

Let's escape! A full play through of our escape room

This will give attendees an overview of the basic patterns of distributed systems enabling attendees to see how to transition their current systems to a better distributed systems architecture. Attendees will also get a basic introduction to IoT devices.

This is a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) workshop. Therefore, attendees are required to bring their own device with the necessary software already installed:

Recommended: Visual Studio 2022 with the 

The NanoFramework does not work with Jetbrains Rider.

The NanoFramework extenions will not work on 32 bits OSs or ARM platforms.

If you are bringing an ARM CPU machine, then you will have to have access to a cloud VM to do some parts of the workshop development. The bulk of the workshop will work on ARM CPU devices though.

Learn Distributed Systems Through Play

Microservices

Architecture

Cloud

This workshop teaches advanced, cutting edge techniques based on ongoing research that are designed to identify and decrease risk, improve confidence in decision making and protect your architecture when the domain is characterized by uncertainty - presenting an entirely new way of thinking about software architecture.

The workshop introduces ideas on the philosophy of architecture, forcing participants to think outside of the technology and relate decision making to markets, culture, economic and societal concerns. It teaches practical techniques in stressor analysis and the use of matrices to make component decisions and gives participants the chance to work with these techniques in labs and groups.

This workshop is suitable for senior developers who want a head start into the world of architecture, for teams embarking on large, risk filled projects, and for seasoned architects seeking new techniques. It has also been successful in unting teams around a common definition of architecture.

Concrete Complexity for Software Engineering

Modelling stress: socio-economic architecture

Contagion analysis and component decisions

Residuality Theory Workshop

This workshop will give you an understanding of how to build with GenAI as a developer. We will go from making a simple API call to an LLM to building interfaces and data pipelines to feed context to your bot. Over 2 hours we will build an application that will give you a basis for creating bots that work with your data and you will leave with a bit of inspiration for what else you can manifest with GenAI.

We will be working with Google's Gemini models, so you will need a Google account and to be able to generate an API key from 

. We will also use DataStax Astra DB, please 


If you're looking to get started developing with LLMs and want to learn the fundamentals, this workshop is for you. We will write the code in JavaScript, but the lessons are universal across programming languages.


We'll dig into topics ranging from the basics of interacting with LLMs, to prompt engineering, the problems with LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic applications.


We will use GitHub Codespaces for the practical parts of the workshop, all you will need is a GitHub account and a web browser.

Build with generative AI in JavaScript

JavaScript

Using BenchmarkDotNet to test and optimize algorithms

Exploring performance during development using the .NET Aspire tools and OpenTelemetry

A grab-bag of performance tips and tricks that can be applied to any .NET solution, from low-level optimizations to simple configuration changes

Attendees will be expected to be familiar with .NET and C#.

High Performance .NET Development

.NET

For .NET developers, there’s a whole raft of new libraries, services, models, and concepts to get your teeth into. This workshop aims to cut through the complexity and focus on what you really need to know to get started with AI programming on .NET. It will emphasize the foundational topics in .NET+AI, including the new Microsoft.Extensions.AI standards.

Embeddings, semantic search, vector databases, vector indexing

Large language models, chat, function calling, structured output, middleware pipelines

Q&A chat/RAG: Ingestion/chunking, retrieval-augmented-generation, evaluation (e.g., RAG triad pattern)

Vision and multimodality, automating business processes

Prompt engineering and prompt injection attacks/defenses

In each case we’ll have explanations/demos plus guided exercises in C#, some being open-ended for more advanced exploration. I hope what you’ll get out of it is a broad understanding of current-day AI+.NET app development, and a sense that you’ve experienced most of the main pieces

Familiarity with C# and typical .NET application patterns, such as dependency injection.

You don’t need to know web programming with ASP.NET Core or Blazor in any significant detail, though one or two exercises will use them. Mostly we’ll work in console apps to preserve focus on AI.

You’ll need a Windows/Linux/macOS laptop with:

.NET 9 – whatever the latest preview is

An editor – either Visual Studio, VS Code, or Rider

Ollama (and while you’re on a fast network at home, run “ollama pull llama3.1” because that’s a 4.7GB download)

If at all possible, also have an OpenAI platform subscription or Azure OpenAI deployment. It’s not strictly required since you can just use Ollama, but OpenAI/AzureOpenAI will be much faster – especially if your laptop doesn’t have a good GPU. And you’ll learn more if you can compare small models on Ollama with the big ones like GPT 4o.

NDC { Melbourne }

Workshops

09:00 - 17:00 (UTC+10)

Residuality Theory Workshop

Barry O'Reilly

Build with generative AI in JavaScript

Phil Nash

Learn Distributed Systems Through Play

William Brander

Fix the Flag - Proactively Defending your software

Laura Bell

Building AI-powered applications with .NET

Steve Sanderson

High Performance .NET Development

Rendle .