As Microsoft continues to work to hold and expand their market share in enterprise SAAS B2B and B2C platforms, they have had to embrace open source technologies and concepts within a Visual Studio Environment to promote a developer-friendly mobile web environment. From adopting and standardizing MVC within ASP.NET, moving towards single page and Microservices, acquiring and open sourcing Xamarin, and now fully embracing a Linux environment in its latest version of Visual Studio and .NET CORE.
How has the closed Microsoft environment become more “open” and in what direction is it going?
What challenges still face .NET in completing with some of the traditionally open source platforms? In what ways is Microsoft responsive to the demands of the development community?
In what areas does it still have a ways to go to truly embrace open source?
Panelists include:
Joel Karr - Currently VP of Engineering at Stratus Intelligence (formerly same role at Restaurant.com), Joel has worked with Azure for the past 5 years spanning two companies. In a seemingly never ending challenge to keep up with Microsoft's additions/changes, he has focused on using Azure to simplify systems and speed up time to production. He now blogs about how to communicate well and be part of a successful software team joelkarr.com @joel_karr.
Jonathan "J." Tower - He is a Microsoft MVP, Telerik Developer Expert, and business owner with over seventeen years of experience in the software industry. He is a Principal Consultant & Partner at Trailhead Technology Partners, a software consulting firm where he loves getting to use software to solve clients' problems and create something that didn't exist before. His current technology interests include the .NET stack, Xamarin, HTML5, and JavaScript. J. is passionate about the software community and organizers several software events in his home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. When he's not at home, J. can often be found sharing what he's learned as a speaker at software events all around the U.S. and the world. jtower@trailheadtechnology.com trailheadtechnology.com jtower.com @jtowermi.
Andy Abbott - Andy is a Co-Founder and CTO at BookedOut, (recently acquired by Shiftgig), and a community leader and founder of Chicago’s largest Microsoft Developers User Group, Chicago .NET. Andy has over two decades of software engineering experience, with extensive knowledge of advanced development technologies and patterns, including nearly ten years of architecting projects in multiple cloud infrastructures. He has impacted industries including telecommunication, logistics, retail, advertising and marketing. Outside of his business responsibilities, Andy enjoys sharing his engineering and entrepreneurial passion with the community through speaking engagements, consultation, and mentoring of local startups. You can follow Andy at twitter.com/asabbott
Omar Khudeira - Omar is the VP of Engineering at Pangea Money Transfer, an international money transfer company founded in Chicago as part of the Impact Engine. Omar joined Pangea early on as an engineer and grew the engineering team to what it is now. Omar continues to contribute to Pangea's tech stack but these days is more focused on scaling the engineering team and transitioning the platform to .NET Core. You can learn more about that work on the Pangea Engineering portal. engineering.gopangea.com/.
You can also find Omar at twitter.com/OmarKhud or github.com/omar
