Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas Call for Papers 2027

The Call for Papers for Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas 2027 is now OPEN.

Proposals are due: August 3rd, 2027 - 11:59 PM PST

Submit your proposal here: https://sessionize.com/vslivelasvegas27

Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas 2027
March 22 - 26, 2027
Planet Hollywood Las Vegas Resort & Casino, Las Vegas, NV

Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas will offer a combination of in-depth and interactive sessions including workshops, hands-on labs, 75-minute breakouts, and 20-minute fast focuses. We invite you to submit sessions in any of these categories. You may also submit across multiple topic areas at a single show. For example, you may choose to submit 3 separate talks under the Developer Experience, Teams & Human Factors; Modern Software Engineering; and AI-Native Software Engineering categories for a single VSLive! Event. We encourage you to speak in all areas where you have valuable experiences and passion to share your knowledge.

To help you in creating successful submissions, we want to share some of the considerations that go into our process of selecting our speakers and sessions for a Visual Studio Live! event. First, each speaker will typically be selected to deliver two 75-minute presentations. That means that it is in your best interest to submit at least three (3) different 75-minute sessions in addition to any other sessions, such as Deep Dives or Fast Focus sessions, that you might be interested in delivering, especially if you are submitting overview or introductory topics that many other speakers are likely to also submit. Next, please make sure that your title is clear and appropriate to the track you are submitting it to, and that your description includes enough detail to understand what audience members will walk away from your sessions having learned. Again, many speakers often provide submissions on the same topics, meaning it comes down to a meaningful title, a quality abstract, and compelling takeaways for our participants. Following these guidelines ensures that the conference chairs do not have to eliminate fantastic speakers from the selection process because they only have 1 talk that is selectable for a given show.

If you enjoy digging in deeper and offering hands-on experience and learning, we are looking for speakers willing to deliver 2-Day, 4-Day, and 6-Week hands-on labs that will be offered as part of the 2027 VSLive! Training Course series.

Session, workshop, and hands-on lab proposals are welcome in the following topic areas:

• .NET, C# & Visual Studio Ecosystem
• AI-Native Software Engineering
• Cloud, Platform & DevOps Engineering
• Cross-Platform App Development
• Data Engineering & Intelligent Analytics
• Developer Experience, Teams & Human Factors
• Emerging Architectures & Future Tech
• Modern Software Engineering
• Modern Web Development

AI-Native Software Engineering

• Agentic AI development, with Microsoft Agent Framework, Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Foundry SDK, Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, Microsoft Copilot Studio, AI Toolkit for VS Code, Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit, and Microsoft 365 Agents SDK
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocols - building and consuming MCP servers, MCP in Visual Studio and Copilot Studio, enterprise MCP authentication and governance, and multi-agent coordination
• RAG application development tools and techniques, vector embeddings and search, and vector database capabilities in Azure AI Search, Cosmos DB and SQL Server
• Azure AI, including Azure OpenAI, Azure Machine Learning and Azure AI Services
• Microsoft Copilot technologies and development, including Copilot Studio, building Copilot plug-ins, or using copilots in dev tools
• GitHub Copilot
• Other AI assistant tools like Claude Code, Google Gemini, Cursor, Cody, Meta Llama, etc.
• Self-hosting models for development using tools like Ollama and LMStudio
• OpenAI services and APIs
• Anthropic services and APIs
• Google services and APIs
• Generative AI tooling, including prompt flow, Semantic Kernel and its successor Microsoft Agent Framework, Azure OpenAI Studio, Azure AI Foundry and Responsible AI Dashboard
• AI in Power Apps and in-application AI on Windows
• Developing for Copilot+ PCs, Phi, Small Language Models, and model fine-tuning
• AI ethics and bias detection - fairness in ML models
• Explainable AI (XAI) - model interpretability techniques
• AI red teaming and adversarial testing
• Privacy-preserving AI - federated learning, differential privacy
• Prompt engineering best practices - systematic approaches to prompt design
• AI testing strategies - evaluating LLM outputs, regression testing for AI
• Model evaluation frameworks - choosing metrics, A/B testing AI features
• AI observability - monitoring LLM applications in production
• Computer vision - Azure AI Vision, custom vision models
• Speech and audio AI - Azure AI Speech, transcription, TTS
• Document intelligence - Azure AI Document Intelligence (Form Recognizer)
• Multi-modal AI applications - combining text, image, audio
• AI for accessibility - using AI to improve application accessibility

Modern Software Engineering

• Visual Studio tooling that facilitates Agile Software Development Practices (Scrum / XP / Lean)
• Leading practices in test development, execution strategy, environment management, and automation
• Developer “inner loop” optimization (workstation configuration, using containers, shells, etc.)
• Customizing your team development environment
• Windows Subsystem for Linux, also known as “Bash on Windows”
• Development, Quality, and Security leading practices
• Asynchronous development techniques
• General security in practice for engineering teams
• Application Security (AppSec) fundamentals - OWASP Top 10, secure coding practices
• Identity and Access Management - Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD), OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML

Cloud, Platform & DevOps Engineering

• Key Pillars of DevOps (automation, collaboration, customer centricity, etc.)
• Agentic DevOps
• DevSecOps and other XXXOps enhancements
• Operations for developers (on premises and cloud)
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Platform Engineering
• Azure DevOps Services
• Azure DevOps Server (latest release)
• Azure DevOps and GitHub integration
• GitHub Enterprise Cloud
• GitHub Enterprise Server
• GitHub Advanced Security
• GitHub Codespaces
• Microsoft DevOps Tooling (version control, agile planning, build, release, monitoring)
• Online services outside of Microsoft, such as GitLab and AWS
• Release Tooling (Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Chef, Puppet, Octopus Deploy)
• Secure pipeline tooling and management
• Component management and attestation
• Observability and Monitoring benefits, strategies, and tooling
• Application Analytics (OpenTelemetry, App Insights, New Relic, etc.)
• Migrating from a non-Microsoft platform to an Azure DevOps Server/Services environment
• Cloud, server, and messaging technologies
• CNCF tools, libraries, and frameworks such as dapr
• Container technology like containerd, Docker, podman, Kubernetes, Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), Azure Container Apps (ACA), and Azure Container Registry (ACR)
• Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud
• Microsoft Azure new features and Marketplace offerings
• Microservices architecture, design, and implementation
• Serverless computing (Azure Functions, Amazon Lambda)
• Azure Logic Apps, Power Automate, PowerApps
• Low code/no code, including Power Platform and SharePoint
• Services in general (REST, queuing, gRPC, etc.)
• Hosting non-Microsoft platforms in Azure (Java, NodeJS, Python, etc.)
• Hybrid cloud architectures - Azure Arc, on-premises integration
• Multi-cloud strategies - managing across Azure, AWS, GCP
• Cloud cost optimization - FinOps practices, Azure Cost Management, cost allocation
• Cloud governance - Azure Policy, landing zones, tagging strategies
• Resource organization - management groups, subscriptions, resource groups
• Event-driven architectures and CQRS - Azure Event Grid, event sourcing, and command-query responsibility separation

Data Engineering & Intelligent Analytics

• Entity Framework
• Integrating “legacy” data to modern applications
• SQL Server 2025, including SQL Server on Linux and containers
• Azure SQL Database, including Serverless and Hyperscale, Azure SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI), and Azure SQL Edge
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB
• Microsoft BI, including Power BI, Power BI Premium, Microsoft Fabric, and SQL Server Analysis Services
• Big Data/Data Lake/Lakehouse, including Microsoft Fabric Data Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Eventhouse and Data Engineering, Azure Synapse Analytics, HDInsight, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Explorer and Azure Data Lake Storage
• Data Management, including Microsoft Purview, Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Fabric Data Factory (pipelines and Dataflows Gen2), SQL Server Integration Services
• NoSQL, including Cosmos DB, Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra
• IoT and streaming analytics, including Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Stream Analytics, Spark Streaming on Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics
• Data tooling, including SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), and Visual Studio Code with add-ins
• Data quality frameworks and tools
• Master data management (MDM)
• Data lineage and cataloging - beyond basic Purview
• Data privacy and anonymization - differential privacy, data masking
• Database performance tuning - query optimization, indexing strategies
• Database migration tools and strategies - Azure Database Migration Service
• Polyglot persistence - choosing the right database for the job
• Graph databases - Azure Cosmos DB Gremlin API, Neo4j
• Time-series databases - Azure Data Explorer, InfluxDB
• Durable Functions for data orchestration
• Machine Learning (ML), including Azure Machine Learning, Azure AutoML, Microsoft Fabric Data Science and FLAML, ML/AI on Azure Databricks, ML.NET
• Data Science, including R and Python standalone, in Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse Analytics, in SQL Server, in Azure SQL Managed Instance, in Power BI, on HDInsight and/or on Azure Databricks
• MLOps and model monitoring, including MLflow on Databricks and in Microsoft Fabric

Cross-Platform App Development

• Blazor native and hybrid app development
• Flutter, Uno Platform, Avalonia, and similar products
• .NET MAUI for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac
• Upgrading / Migrating Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI
• iOS and Android native development (Swift, Java, Kotlin)
• Voice, text, and other bot experiences
• Mobile web and responsive web design
• WinUI, WPF and Windows Forms applications with .NET 11
• Design Principles (UI, UX, Interaction)
• Accessibility (a11y) in modern applications - WCAG 2.2/3.0, ARIA, inclusive design principles, accessibility testing tools and automation, screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation patterns
• Windows Terminal and command-line tools
• Cross-platform UI testing - Appium, Selenium, Playwright
• Design systems and component libraries
• Design tokens and theming
• Animation and micro-interactions
• Localization and internationalization (i18n)

Developer Experience, Teams & Human Factors

• Burnout recognition, prevention, and recovery for individuals and teams
• Confidence and resilience in software teams, including imposter syndrome
• Psychological safety and trust in software teams
• Effective communication for collaboration, negotiation, and influence
• Constructive feedback and difficult conversations
• Conflict resolution and navigating team disagreements
• Team collaboration in remote and asynchronous environments
• Cross-functional collaboration between engineering, design, and business
• Self-awareness and interpersonal effectiveness in team settings
• Leadership skills for engineers at all levels, with or without title
• Mentorship, sponsorship, and developing others
• Building and sustaining healthy culture
• Organizational change management for teams and technology adoption
• Time management, prioritization, and managing competing demands
• Cognitive load management in engineering work and systems
• Designing developer workflows and tools for productivity and wellbeing
• Effective use of collaboration and delivery tools, such as Teams, Slack, and Azure DevOps
• Facilitating effective meetings, workshops, and agile ceremonies
• Agile, Lean, and modern product delivery practices
• Delivering software effectively at scale
• Value Stream Mapping and flow optimization
• High-quality code reviews and collaborative engineering practices
• Blameless postmortems and learning from failure
• Metrics, OKRs, and measuring team and product outcomes
• Aligning engineering work with customer and business value
• Customer experience and human-centered product thinking
• Creative problem solving in complex engineering environments
• Technical writing and documentation for developer audiences
• Career growth and evolving paths for technologists
• Leveraging AI to enhance productivity and non-technical skills
• Human-AI collaboration and its impact on engineering workflows
• Neurodiversity and inclusive practices in engineering teams
• Remote work ergonomics and developer wellbeing
• Diversity, inclusion, and equitable team practices
• Decision-making in engineering teams and organizations
• Onboarding, knowledge sharing, and reducing knowledge silos

.NET, C# & Visual Studio Ecosystem

• Visual Studio productivity
• Visual Studio 2026 as an AI-native IDE - Profiler Agent, Debugger Agent, Copilot agents and skills, Adaptive Paste, and MCP integration
• Visual Studio Code and extensions
• .NET 11
• .NET Aspire
• Cross platform .NET for Linux, Windows, Mac, and others
• New C# language features
• Advanced .NET, such as building analyzers and .NET code generation
• Deep dive topics such as Dependency Injection, threading, performance optimization, and memory usage
• Instrumentation, logging, tracing, and OpenTelemetry
• Maker / Hobby / Games
• .NET Upgrade Assistant - automated migration tooling
• Hot Reload and Edit and Continue - advanced scenarios
• Visual Studio profiling tools deep dive - CPU, memory, database profiling
• Debugging techniques - advanced breakpoints, tracepoints, debugging production
• NuGet package management - private feeds, package creation, versioning
• Minimal APIs in depth - beyond basics
• gRPC in .NET - building high-performance services
• Background services and hosted services - IHostedService, BackgroundService
• Native AOT compilation - benefits, constraints, use cases
• Source generators - creating and using them
• Span<T> and Memory<T> - high-performance memory patterns
• System.Text.Json - advanced serialization scenarios
• LINQ optimization - performance considerations
• Nullable reference types - migration and best practices
• Record types and pattern matching - modern C# features
• DevOps Features in Visual Studio Enterprise (CodeLens, Profilers, IntelliTrace)

Modern Web Development

• Blazor (server-side, client-side, and .NET 11 capabilities)
• Angular, React, Vue, and other JavaScript UI frameworks
• WebAssembly, including .NET, Go, Rust, and others
• Progressive Web Apps
• ECMAScript/JavaScript
• TypeScript
• node.js and other server-side frameworks
• CSS and related tooling and frameworks
• Micro-frontends - architecture and implementation
• Build tools and bundlers - Vite, esbuild, Webpack 5+
• State management - Redux, Zustand, Context API patterns
• GraphQL - Apollo Client, Relay, GraphQL in .NET
• Server-side rendering (SSR) - Next.js, Remix, Nuxt
• Web Components - custom elements, shadow DOM
• Progressive enhancement - building resilient web apps
• Web Vitals and performance - Core Web Vitals optimization
• Service Workers - advanced caching strategies, background sync
• Web APIs - IndexedDB, Web Storage, Notification API
• ASP.NET Core Features
• ASP.NET Razor Pages
• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Web API
• Visual Studio Web developer tooling (built-in, add-ons, testing)
• GraphQL server implementation - Hot Chocolate, GraphQL .NET
• SignalR for real-time applications
• Minimal APIs patterns - validation, middleware, OpenAPI
• Rate limiting and throttling - ASP.NET Core rate limiting middleware
• API security - CORS, authentication, authorization policies
• ASP.NET Core performance optimization - response caching, output caching
• Load balancing strategies - sticky sessions, health checks
• Web API design
• API versioning and lifecycle management

Emerging Architectures & Future Tech

• Post-quantum cryptography - quantum-safe algorithms and migration, including PQC support in .NET 11 and Windows
• WebAssembly outside the browser, such as WASI, component model, and wasmCloud
• HTTP/3 and QUIC - next-generation protocols
• Edge computing architectures - pushing compute to the edge with Azure IoT Operations, Cloudflare Workers, and WebAssembly
• Service mesh and the move to sidecar-less networking - Istio Ambient, Linkerd, and eBPF-based data planes
• Local-first software and CRDTs - conflict-free replicated data types for offline-capable, sync-first applications
• Confidential computing - hardware-based trusted execution environments for processing sensitive data
• Homomorphic encryption - running computations on data that is never decrypted
• Quantum computing for developers - Azure Quantum, Q#, and hybrid quantum-classical algorithms
• Decentralized identity and verifiable credentials - DIDs, verifiable credentials, and reducing reliance on passwords
• Durable execution and workflow-as-code - Temporal, durable workflows, and resilient long-running processes
• Post-REST API design - tRPC, typed RPC, and end-to-end type safety from server to client
• Rust for .NET developers - interop, native performance-critical components, and when Rust is the right tool
• eBPF and programmable infrastructure - kernel-level observability, networking, and security
• Sustainable and carbon-aware software - measuring and reducing the energy footprint of cloud workloads
• Spatial computing and mixed reality - building for Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest, and immersive interfaces
• Agentic web standards - NLWeb, machine-readable interfaces, and designing applications for autonomous agents
• Matter and Thread - converging open standards for IoT and connected devices

Submission Guidelines

Please include the following information with your submission. Failure to supply all requested information may limit opportunities for selection:

• Speaker's Name
• Speaker's Title
• Speaker's Company
• Title of Presentation
• 100-word Description of Presentation
• 3-5 bullets explaining what the attendee will learn from the presentation, also known as learning objectives
• Speaker's Color Photo, hi-resolution
• Speaker's Bio, including previous conference speaking/presentation experience

Speakers that are chosen to present at Visual Studio Live! events will receive a full-conference pass and a stipend for each session they present. Speakers are responsible for their own travel costs and incidentals. The speaker stipend for two talks typically covers domestic flight costs and travel to/from the airport. Visual Studio Live! will also cover hotel accommodation, room and tax only, for a pre-determined number of nights at a host hotel as outlined in the speaker agreement.

Proposals are due: August 3rd, 2027 - 11:59 PM PST

Submit your proposal here: https://sessionize.com/vslivelasvegas27

We look forward to your submissions!

~ The Visual Studio Live! Event Team