Michigan .NET Users Group (MI.NET)

Agenda

• 5:30 - 6:30pm Networking
• 6:30 - 7:30pm Presentation
• 7:30 - 7:45pm Closing

Abstract
TBD

Bio
TBD

Agenda

• 5:30 - 6:30pm Networking
• 6:30 - 7:30pm Presentation
• 7:30 - 7:45pm Closing

Abstract
How many times have you deployed something to production thinking, “This code is perfect—what could possibly go wrong?” Then, the next morning, your leadership is swarming around your desk because production is down? Or maybe a client hands you their code and expects it to “just work” without a proper lower environment?
Production issues happen to all of us—and to me, more times than I’d like to admit. The key to avoiding them starts long before deployment. Quality begins in a developer’s local environment.

In this session, we’ll explore how tools like Docker, Postman, and Azure DevOps can raise the quality of your software from the very first line of code. You’ll learn how to use these tools to improve testing, streamline workflows, and increase both your team’s confidence and leadership’s trust when it’s time to push to production.

Key takeaways:

• How Docker can make local environments more reliable and production-like
• Using Postman to ensure APIs behave before they go live
• Leveraging Azure DevOps for automated testing, CI/CD, and quality gates
• Practical strategies to reduce “surprise” production issues

Bio
Jim Rieck has been helping companies build custom software solutions using a variety of solutions since 1998. Over the years, he has worked in the boating, fin-tech, automotive, accounting, tele-communications, health care, e-commerce and the service industries. He has lead app dev teams, developer training programs and technical user groups. He is very passionate about architecting solutions using the latest technologies and leading teams to strive for excellence.

Agenda

• 5:30 - 6:30pm Networking
• 6:30 - 7:30pm Presentation
• 7:30 - 7:45pm Closing

Abstract
So you push a Kubernetes Helm chart in your Visual Studio Code IDE from your local to a Git branch and kickoff the pipeline in Harness for the changes to be deployed to a container. You'd then have to go to OCP (or your cloud provider of choice), open stateful sets, pod logs to how the deployment is going on. What if you could see all that right where you pushed your code? You could be coding in your IDE all the while seeing the status of your pods.

This talk presents a practical architecture for exposing operational capabilities through MCP-style servers (Model Context Protocol) so developers can interact with OpenShift resources directly from their local development environment. Instead of treating the IDE as only a coding surface, we turn it into a controlled entry point for runtime diagnostics such as pod log retrieval, namespace-aware querying, rollout inspection, and incident triage.

I will also be posting the link to my MCP server that anybody can use and customize to their needs!

Bio
Vineel Arekapudi works at the intersection of large-scale data engineering, cloud platforms, and applied AI. He currently builds and leads modern data platforms at a major U.S. bank, where he designs lakehouse and streaming architectures that operate at multi-billion-record scale across cloud environments.

His background spans the full evolution of enterprise data systems—from mainframe and Teradata warehouses to cloud-native lakehouses built on Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, and Kubernetes. Over the past decade, his work has focused on building production-grade data platforms, including high-throughput ingestion pipelines, real-time analytics systems, and ML-ready data infrastructure used by data scientists, analysts, and AI teams.

In addition to data engineering, Vineel has deep experience in full-stack platform development using Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, and modern front-end frameworks. This enables him to design data systems not just as pipelines, but as complete products—with APIs, services, governance layers, and developer tooling.

His current interests include open table formats (Apache Iceberg), lakehouse architecture, metadata-driven governance, and building scalable AI-ready data platforms. He enjoys sharing practical lessons from real production systems—what works, what breaks, and how to design data infrastructure that lasts.

Agenda

• 5:30 - 6:30pm Networking
• 6:30 - 7:30pm Presentation
• 7:30 - 7:45pm Closing

Abstract
AI agents are rapidly becoming a powerful architectural pattern for building intelligent applications that can reason, take actions, and collaborate with other services. Microsoft’s Agent Framework provides a developer-friendly model for building these agents using familiar .NET and Python patterns while integrating with modern AI services.

In this session, we’ll take a developer-centric look at the Microsoft Agent Framework and explore how to build and run your first agent. We’ll walk through the core concepts of the framework, including agents, tools, middleware, and workflows.
By the end of this session, you’ll understand how the Microsoft Agent Framework enables developers to build production-ready agent-based applications on Azure.

Bio
Michael Collier is a Principal Architect at Centric Consulting with over 20 years of experience in designing and delivering scalable, cloud-native solutions. A recognized expert in Microsoft Azure, Michael brings deep expertise in solution architecture, technical leadership, and improving the developer experience. He thrives at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and strategy; helping teams navigate complexity, adopt modern cloud practices, and deliver impact at scale.