News

Microsoft Offers Visual Studio Subscriber Discounts to VSLive! Dev Conference at Redmond HQ

• By David Ramel
• 06/10/2025

Microsoft offered a discount for subscribers to its flagship Visual Studio IDE who are interested in attending an August developer conference being held at company headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

A June 5 tweet from the Microsoft Visual Studio account reads:

"Exciting news! Join us at VSLive! from August 4-8 at Microsoft HQ! Visual Studio subscribers get an exclusive discount at http://my.visualstudio.com. Use it for yourself and your team. Meet the developers behind your favorite features!"

Being held at Microsoft HQ of course gives all kinds of access to the company's developer advocates and other experts at the company, and the conference features a bunch of them.

With our own special access (the VSLive! series is presented by our parent company), we have been publishing Q&As with Microsoft experts and others on tap to present at the big conference.

Here are some articles to give you a taste of what to expect on topics ranging from Blazor to Azure Machine Learning.

1. Empowering AI Applications with Vector Search in SQL Server and Azure Cosmos DB: This article previews Leonard Lobel's session on how developers can add AI-powered semantic search to existing applications using vector search and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in SQL Server and Azure Cosmos DB -- without needing a separate AI stack. It explores how to generate and store text embeddings, optimize vector search performance, and handle implementation challenges
2. Predicting the Future Using Azure Machine Learning: This article previews Eric D. Boyd's session on building predictive applications with Azure Machine Learning. It covers key features of the platform -- including AutoML, deployment, monitoring, and security -- while offering practical tips for bringing predictive capabilities into real-world solutions even without deep data science expertise.
3. Next-gen SQL Projects with Microsoft.Build.Sql: This article previews Drew Skwiers-Koballa's session on modernizing SQL project workflows with Microsoft.Build.Sql. It explains how the next-gen SDK improves version control, enhances DevOps integration, and supports advanced deployment and validation strategies -- helping developers treat database changes like application code and streamline CI/CD pipelines.
4. Creating Business Applications Using Blazor: This article previews Michael Washington's session on building modern business apps with Blazor. It explores key Blazor concepts -- binding, routing, JavaScript interop -- and covers techniques for integrating .NET libraries, optimizing performance, supporting offline scenarios with WebAssembly, and implementing secure authentication using Microsoft Entra and Azure B2C.
5. Mastering Blazor Authentication and Authorization: This article previews Rockford Lhotka's session on securing Blazor applications across server-side, WebAssembly, and .NET MAUI Hybrid scenarios. It explains how to implement flexible authentication and fine-grained authorization using identity and claims, and provides insights into modernizing legacy apps with Blazor while balancing cross-platform requirements and secure user experience.

Learn more about VSLive! at Microsoft HQ in Redmond in August here.