Speaking

On Wednesday, I held a session titled “Feature Flags and Dynamic Configurations in C#” at WPC 2025. It went well, at least judging by the offline questions that came in at the end of the session and which almost made us late for lunch. Attending WPC is always exciting. The audience is large, the rooms are big and well-equipped, the energy is just right, and there’s always a chance to catch up with friends and colleagues. I especially enjoy seeing fellow Microsoft MVPs and speakers. ...

I presented a session at the .NET Conference Italia 2025 in Milan a couple of weeks ago. The title was “Integrating our applications with LLMs and AI via MCP Servers”. It was well received; there were good questions throughout the talk and in the hall afterward. Surprisingly, live coding and demos went relatively smoothly. The fine guys at ASP Italia just published the video in case someone is interested. Yeah, it is in Italian. I got a transcript from MacWhisper and then asked Claude to translate and clean it up. It did a pretty good job, so let me know if there’s any interest in an English transcript; I might post it here. ...

I’m presenting at the WPC 2025 Conference on December 3rd in Milan. My session topic is Feature Flag Management and Dynamic Configurations in C#. I will use a Web API as an example project, and since I’ll be using curl live to query it, I’ll need to pipe responses through jq to obtain nicely formatted JSON for the audience. The problem with jq is that it crashes on 400s or 500s because the response body is empty in those cases. Error responses are inherent to the demo, and crashes are not the most desirable thing during a presentation. ...

Brent Ozar’s article below resonates with my post-COVID experience as a conference speaker. From big national and international conferences to local meetups like the one I run, attendance has been dwindling following the hiatus. Of all the proposed reasons, I believe “people switched how they’re learning” is crucial; just think about YouTube, LLMs, and the plethora of free and paid online courses. Why Aren’t People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore? ...

On Thursday, I will be conducting an MCP Server session at the Summer AI Afternoon event organized by DevMarche in collaboration with DevRomagna, the neighbouring development communities. There are more than 50 people signed up already, and I’m so looking forward to meeting old and new friends down South.

Today, I learned about Marp, the “Markdown Presentation Ecosystem,” which comes with an enticing promise: to create beautiful slide decks using an intuitive Markdown experience. For my latest presentation, I utilized the Slides Extended Obsidian plugin, which is based on reveal.js—an excellent option for keeping slide decks within one’s Obsidian vault (I keep all notes, work and personal journals, and knowledge in Obsidian.) Marp could be a viable alternative to the plugin, as Obsidian notes are just markdown files. The advantage here is that I can further elaborate or iterate on my slides, for example, from the command line, as Marp comes with a dedicated CLI tool that lets you export to PDF, HTML, and more. Additionally, Marp is not based on reveal.js, a tool that has given me headaches in the past. ...

Last night, I presented a session titled MCP or Connecting our Apps to LLMs at DevRomagna, our local developer’s community, and I think it went well. I had intended to record the audio with the idea of transcribing it with MacWhisper and then publishing it here on my site, but I forgot to do so, which is a pity. The session lasted almost two hours (I had thought it would take less time), during which I deviated somewhat from the script, using slides as a guide that were essentially an adaptation of the notes I had taken during my experiments. I showed the code for the MCP servers I created (stdio and streamable HTTP transports), demonstrated the various ways to link them with LLMs (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and VS Code), and then shared my thoughts on the entire matter. ...

I presented at .NET Conf Rome 2025 yesterday, and it went very well, or at least that was my impression. I enjoyed myself, and the reception seemed great, from the organizers, the other speakers (most of whom are fellow MVPs), and the audience. But the kicker was just before the session when, at the coffee break, an attendant approached me to shake hands and tell me he had known me for a long time because he discovered and used Eve in a research project he was working on years ago. As I recall, he had attended one of my Eve sessions at EuroPython, maybe in Berlin in 2014. As is often the case, he had no immediate need for my project and shelved it as “interesting, and cool that it’s by an Italian author, but I don’t need really it”. Then, a couple of years later, in a time of need, he recalled that little presentation of mine, and, long story short, Eve ended up being adopted by a big, unnamed corp or research institute. I thanked him from the bottom of my heart and told him it was worth preparing for the talk, waking up at 4 am and travelling to Rome to meet him and hear his story. It’s moments like this that make it all worth it. Also, hearing such a Python story at a .NET event was unexpected. ...

I sat to jot down a quick introduction to my C# 13 What’s New and Interesting session next week, and what I ended up with instead is a long rant or, should I dare, stream of consciousness that is certainly inappropriate for a five-minute introduction. I’ll have to cut most of it down, especially on the personal story part, but my site might be a good place to host it in all its completeness. I may reference this post at the start of the session on Monday for those few poor souls who might be interested. ...

I’m speaking at the .NET Conference Italia 2024 on Dec 16th in Milan at the Microsoft House. My session is titled C# 13 What’s New and Interesting and will be on the latest iteration of the C# language. We’ll also briefly touch on .NET 9, which was also just released. Hope to see you there (make sure to come to me to say Hi!)