Bitbash 2025: Two days packed with dotnet and cloud

January 24th and 25th, 2025, Bitbash was held in the Netherlands at Info Support HQ in Veenendaal. One day of workshops followed by one day packed with sessions. This was my second time attending and I enjoyed it a lot. What did I learn and what is now on my list of things I have to check into? They will probably organize it again next year and I will definitely be there.

Day 1: Workshops

Darp was already on my list of things to check out, and after a half day workshop I am even more convinced that we have to check this out. A distributed application, spanning several microservices, all being able to call each other, while still tracing everything with distributed tracing using open telemetry. I can see us building our next application in Dapr.

I like being able to do stuff myself at my own pace, and getting this hands-on experience was great. Seeing the stuff in action with super clear instructions makes me want to do more with it.

In the afternoon I attended another workshop, about Aspire. My prior experience with Aspire is already substantial, so this workshop was not really showing me anything new. I did learn some tricks around Aspire to easily run node front-end applications as part of an Aspire application, that might come in handy in the future.

Lunch was well organized, as was the rest of the day. Two workshops was a great experience. And did I tell you it was free? Yes, free. If you’re into Azure or dotnet, you should definitely check out Bitbash next year.

Day 2: Sessions

Saturday 25th of Janurary, getting up early to drive to Veenendaal. I was really looking forward to the session about Dapr (again) by Marc Duiker bsky, so I made sure I was there around 8:50 to start with some coffee and a chat with some of the other attendees.

Failure is not an option: Durable Execution + Darp

As a Dapr Community Manager and long time Microsoft MVP, I did not expected anything else than a great session with some pixel art. Showing us the new durable execution feature of Dapr was cool. Your apps will fail and your network will not always be up. It’s a matter of how you handle that. Durable execution seems to handle all that complexity for you, definitely something I have to check-out.

Using managed identity to connect to your own custom API

A session by myself, more on that in a separate blog post.

Yes I did speak at Bitbash (for the second time), but that did not play any role in forming an opinion about this event.

Using the latest OpenAPI features in .NET 9

A session by Sander ten Brinke. I’ve been using OpenAPI for a while now, on one hand we have an automatically generated API specification, that is used during development in Swagger UI to quickly being able to call endpoints. On the other hand, using Kiota to generate strong typed clients for our APIs (C# Blazor mostly).

I knew a lot will change starting with .NET 9, but I didn’t know exactly what was changing. Our current setup does not support AOT compiling very well, so we are looking for options. It seems the brand new OpenAPI generator built by Microsoft itself does support AOT (partially) and that does make your api faster. So we can put this on the list of things to check out.

Duplo to Domain Knowledge

A talk by Bart Renders and Michaël Hompus. I did not know what to expect from this session, but it was a great session. They showed us how they used Duplo to explain domain knowledge to new team members. Building a serious game seems to help a lot in understanding the domain, and doubles as a team building exercise.

Azure Development Environments and Dev Box

Last session of the day was a session by Erwin Staal. I’ve nevers used or seen Azure Development Environments before and I definitely have to work with this in my next project. Easily (after initial setup) create a new environment for a pull request, and tearing in down once the pull requests is merged. I see us automating stuff like this. That would really make the “code review” part of the job better manageable. No more, “it works on my machine”, but instead “we are fully confident this works in the cloud”.

Conclusion

Bitbash was a great event, and if you are into Azure and/or dotnet, you should keep an eye on their website for next year’s event. If there is one thing I would change, it would be the aweful lighting in the general area, it did match the Ghostbusters theme, but it’s not best for taking pictures.

Will I see you at Bitbash 2026? Let me know on LinkedIn if you do, and we can have a chat over some coffee.