When JK worked with many different clients and projects, he frequently heard “EF Core is slow” or “We should do this in raw SQL” only to realize they haven’t used EF Core correctly.

JK will show you how to improve your EF Core statements as well as how various configurations impacts the performance and scalability of your application. You’ll be blown away at how small changes can significantly impact not only the performance but also stability of the application.

Caching is fundamental in building fast and reliable systems, and in .NET there are multiple ways to do that.

In this talk we’ll explore the ins and outs of caching in .NET, from memory to distributed up to hybrid caching: we’ll see both the new HybridCache from Microsoft and FusionCache.

Do you want to learn how to write C# code that executes faster and allocates less? This session is packed with practical examples and code demos of where and how high-performance APIs and language features can be applied to your applications.

This session will teach you about using types such as Span to process data and parse strings efficiently. We’ll examine System.IO.Pipelines, offering high-performance I/O, and utilise ArrayPool to help reduce GC allocations. We’ll also discuss how the low-level System.Text.Json APIs can dramatically improve JSON parsing.

Did you know that the .NET compiler turns our async methods into a struct? And that .NET adds a try/catch block to each of these classes, potentially hiding thrown exceptions? It’s true!

In this session, we will learn how to best use async/await in C# by analyzing how .NET compiles our async code.

Most of the time when we make mistakes in our code, a message gets displayed wrong or an invoice doesn’t get sent. But sometimes when people make mistakes in code, things literally explode, or bankrupt companies, or make web development a living hell for millions of programmers for years to come.

You’ve seen the tweets about vibe-coded apps getting hacked over silly mistakes — but what can we actually do about it? AI coding agents are amplifiers: they ship faster, but they also ship insecure code, and asking them to “make it secure” rarely works.

Security This talk shows a better approach: shift the focus from chasing specific attacks to teaching solid defensive coding principles. We’ll build security knowledge directly into the agent — using skills, hooks, and standards — so it looks up the right guidance, plans for it, and reviews its own work. You’ll leave knowing how to make your agent produce secure code far more often, by default.

Scaling a database sounds like a great idea, but have you considered the number of ways it can fail? Add some nodes, throw in replication, and suddenly you’re explaining to stakeholders why two customers saw two different truths at the same time. Turns out distributed systems have opinions about physics - but data modeling can help.