VSLive! San Diego 2026 Puts AI at the Core of the Campus IT Stack

• By Rhea Kelly
• 06/11/26

For higher education IT teams working through AI pilots, ERP integrations, student-facing apps, analytics projects, and mounting security concerns, Visual Studio Live! San Diego 2026 offers a look at development practices that are shaping the campus technology landscape. Scheduled for Sept. 14–18 in San Diego, the conference centers on Microsoft technologies, with sessions covering .NET, Azure, GitHub, AI development, data platforms, cloud architecture, application security, and more.

That practical focus was reflected in the experience of Josh Yarbrough, a software developer at Vanderbilt University who came to last year's VSLive! to build deeper Blazor skills after only limited exposure to the framework. His team was already using C# for API and back-end work and wanted to explore Blazor for UI development. "The instructors and classes were very good and focused on topics that I needed to be able to get up to speed quickly," Yarbrough said. After the conference, he added, his team returned to campus and got "a couple of Blazor apps developed and deployed."

Yarbrough also pointed to another benefit of the event: access to instructors and speakers outside the formal sessions. When he and a colleague had technical questions, he said, presenters were able to connect them directly with Microsoft developers who had worked on those specific tools.

Much of this year's agenda focuses on a familiar challenge for higher ed institutions: moving AI from pilots into production. AI sessions range from GitHub Copilot and Copilot Studio to agent frameworks and multimodal applications. The emphasis is on real development workflows, where AI is moving from an add-on to a part of how applications are built and supported.

Several sessions get into the operational details of how to maintain, monitor, and trust AI-enabled systems after launch. That includes agent-based applications, enterprise data connections, deployment practices, and safety controls. As organizations move beyond first-generation chatbot pilots, campus IT teams must ask: Which systems can an AI tool access? How are results evaluated? Who is responsible when an automated workflow produces a bad recommendation?

Cybersecurity features throughout the agenda as well. A session on Building Practical Zero Trust APIs with .NET 10 and Azure, for example, focuses on managed identity, ingress and egress controls, Azure-native security capabilities, and efficient developer workflows. As applications become more connected and data moves across more services, secure API design becomes harder to treat as optional. The pairing of Zero Trust and developer productivity makes clear that security can no longer be bolted on after the fact — it must be built into everyday engineering practices.

Finally, the conference makes room for the human side of technological change. Sessions on code review culture, project management, career development, and AI's impact on software roles recognize that successful technology projects are not only about tools; they also depend on collaboration, documented decisions, and teams that can manage complexity without added friction. In environments where IT teams are stretched thin across multiple roles, these practices can determine whether new initiatives thrive in the long term.

For higher ed IT teams planning their next round of application, data, and AI projects, the agenda offers insights into where the next campus application stack may be headed. To browse the full agenda and register, visit the VSLive! site here.