My visit to CollabDays!

My visit to CollabDays!

In this blog post, I will tell you about my visit to CollabDays. I will tell you about the talks I attended and the things that I have learned!

🚂 The way there

Together with 3 of my fellow students we went to CollabDays. On the 15th of October, we took a very early train to go to Brussels. We arrived a bit later than expected since there were some problems on the train tracks, but we arrived in time for the event and were welcomed with a nice breakfast. After that, we went to the first talk of the day.

📝 Calling APIs, Consuming Services and Exposing Data using Power Automate

The first talk we attended was titled ‘Calling APIs, Consuming Services and Exposing Data using Power Automate’. This talk was given by Ahmad Najjar. He showed us in a demo how easy it was to use Power Automate to create your own API and how to call existing API’s. Mister Najjar also showed some examples of apps he created with Power Automate and I must say I am quite surprised with the capabilities of the platform! I will definitely look into it more in the future.

📝 PowerShell and MS Graph API demystified

Next up was a talk titled ‘PowerShell and MS Graph API demystified’. The speaker who gave this talk was Michael Seidl. He gave a very interesting talk about a service from Microsoft that I personally didn’t know anything about, called ‘MS Graph’.

During the talk, mister Seidl showed us how to use MS Graph together with PowerShell. It was very interesting to see how easy it was to use MS Graph and how much you can do with it. The way you can automate tasks with MS Graph is very interesting, and I will definitely look into it more in the future.

📝 Blazor + Bot Framework = a Microsoft Teams Platform Dream Team

The third talk we followed was called ‘Blazor + Bot Framework = a Microsoft Teams Platform Dream Team’. This talk had two speakers, their names were: Stephan Bisser and Thomas Goelles. They showed us in a demo how to create a simple bot that works on Teams. A second topic they showed was how to create a Blazor app that can be used inside Teams.

The Bot Framework is something very new and is a good starting point to create bots for Teams. But since it is still very new, it still has some flaws. This should be fixed however in the future. The bots can even be extended with AI to answer questions automatically and to make the bot more intelligent.

📝 IT Insecurity - Understanding the Threat of Modern Cyber-attacks

Micheal Noel gave the talk ‘IT Insecurity - Understanding the Threat of Modern Cyber-attacks’. The main goal of this talk was to show us how important it is to be aware of the threats that are out there. He showed us some examples of methods that are used to hack into systems and how to prevent these attacks. He also showed us some examples of attacks that have been done in the past and how they were prevented.

During the talk, he also showed us some tools that Microsoft offers to prevent cyber-attacks from happening to your system. This tool is called ‘Microsoft Defender’. These tools are very useful and can help you prevent attacks from happening to your system.

📝 Real World Infrastructure Deployment with Bicep: Hype versus Reality

Next up, we followed the session called ‘Real World Infrastructure Deployment with Bicep: Hype versus Reality’. This talk was given by Spencer Harbar. In this session we got information about Bicep. Bicep is a domain-specific language that is used to deploy infrastructure. For me personally, this was a very interesting session since I had never seen anything like this before. During the session, we got a little demo of how we could use Bicep to deploy infrastructure and how to deploy our applications. Overall, a very interesting session!

📝 How to deploy your Power Platform solution company-wide: Azure DevOps can help with CI/CD

The last session we attended was about CI/CD. It is a term we hear very often and it struck our interest. The session was given by Feline Parein. In this session, we received a lot of information about a tool from Microsoft called ‘Azure DevOps’. This tool is used to automate the deployment of your applications. She demonstrated the use of this tool through a business case she had a while back. The way she showed how powerful Azure DevOps is by deploying 170 solutions and 170 applications all starting from 1 master solution. This was very impressive, and I will definitely look into this tool more in the future.

📝 During the breaks

During the breaks, we had the opportunity to talk to the speakers and to ask them questions. This was a very nice opportunity to connect with the speakers on LinkedIn.

We also had the opportunity to talk to sponsors of the event. It was nice to learn about all the different companies that were present at the event. For example, we talked with a company called CTG who is a company that offers IT services. They were very nice and gave us some information about the company and the services they offer. They also talked about potential internships and jobs that they offer. Overall, a very nice experience!

🤔 My Thoughts about the day

Overall, I had a very nice day at CollabDays. I learned a lot of new things and I got to meet a lot of new people. It was the first time I attended a conference like this and I really enjoyed it. Very curious to see what the next one will be like!