Bill Wilder    I had the opportunity (22-Nov-2025) to present at the 39th running of Boston Code Camp since started in 2003. Some links and notes and comments below. First, thank you to the organizers, sponsors, and speakers who have been making this possible since 2003 MCP Model Context Protocol is coming up on...

Bill Wilder    I had the opportunity (15-Aug-2025) to talk to Azure Tech Group Bangladesh about how human language has become the new UI as part of their ML Summer School BD program. The talk was recorded and posted to YouTube. The tool used in demos to illustrate an embedding model in action can be found at...

Bill Wilder    Along with fellow panelists Jason Haley, Veronika Kolesnikova (the three of us run Boston Azure AI), and Udaiappa Ramachandran (he runs Nashua Cloud .NET & DevBoston), I was part of a Boston Azure AI event to discuss highlights from Microsoft’s 2025 Build conference. I knew a couple of the things I...

Bill Wilder    Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to two simultaneous audiences: Nashua Cloud .NET & DevBoston community tech groups. The talk was on Model Context Protocol (MCP) which, in a nutshell, is the rising star for answering the following question: What’s the best way to allow my LLM to call my...

Bill Wilder    The organizers of the AI Community Conference AICO Boston event did an incredible job. The conference was first-rate and I really enjoyed engaging with attendees and speakers, while learning from everyone. I delivered a new iteration of my talk on how it is possible to have Human Language as the...

Bill Wilder    Earlier today I spoke at the Memphis edition of the Global AI Bootcamp 2025 hosted by the Memphis Technology User Groups. My talk was Human Language is the new UI. How is this possible? and resources and a few notes follow. Thank you Douglas Starnes for organizing It was similar to, but not...

Bill Wilder    Earlier today I spoke at the Cleveland OH edition of the Global AI Bootcamp 2025 hosted by Sam Nasr of the Cleveland Azure group. My talk was Human Language is the new UI. How is this possible? and resources and a few notes follow. This is from the https: funwithvectors.com app I used to show...

Bill Wilder    29-Mar-2025 Today I attended and contributed a talk to the Boston Code Camp 38 (yes, impressively, the 38th edition of this event). I made the trip with Maura (she gave a talk combining Cryptocurrency And Agentic AI) and Kevin (he gave a talk on Top 10 AI Security Risks). and we got to hang out...

Bill Wilder    I was in the audience at the Microsoft PDC on Nov 3, 2008 where Windows Azure was unveiled on stage by Ray Ozzie in the conference’s opening keynote. At the 16:45 mark he graciously tipped his hat to Jeff Bezos and the AWS team, then announced Windows Azure - a platform with two services: Azure...

Bill Wilder    Last night I was guest speaker at the Boston .NET Architecture community group. I learned they are now 21-year-olds. That’s a long track record The audience had some insightful questions, which I always appreciate. My talk focused on the perspective of the application architect and not the data...

Bill Wilder    Today I attended and spoke at the 37th Boston Code Camp. The rainy weather was just enough to maximize attendance. There was an incredibly energetic group of inquisitive people at my talk which was on how you can give your AI LLM a goal and some tools and let it figure out how to move [&]

Bill Wilder    At Virtual Boston Azure tonight Jason Haley and I teamed up to talk about ways Gen AI can be integrated with your existing systems. In the case of existing enterprise software systems, many are written in C# and Java, both languages supported by Semantic Kernel. Semantic Kernel also supports Python...

Bill Wilder    Boston Azure held a virtual event to review highlights from Microsoft Build 2024.

Bill Wilder    Boston Azure held a virtual event to review highlights from Microsoft Build 2024.

Bill Wilder    I wrote some code demonstrating how to use Azure OpenAI to support the AI mini-workshop we ran for Virtual Boston Azure. I created versions in Python and C#. This weekend I create a web front-end for it and deployed as an Azure Static Web App with an Azure Function supporting the refactored C#...

Bill Wilder    We ran a successful AI mini-workshop at Virtual Boston Azure. There was coding and learning about AI and the programmatically interacting with the Azure OpenAI services.

Bill Wilder    23-Mar-2024 Always great to hang out with the greater Boston tech community. Today I attended and contributed a talk to Boston Code Camp 36 (the 36th edition of this event). I made the trip with Maura (she gave a talk on blockchain). and we met a lot of cool people and had a great time. I spoke on ...

Bill Wilder    24-Feb-2024 Had a great time hanging out with the Orlando tech community at their annual Code Camp. I made the trip with Maura (she gave a talk on blockchain) and we met a lot of cool people and had a great time. I spoke on GitHub Copilot. Much of my talk was demo and discussion [&]

Bill Wilder    My talk description: According to legend, programmers back in the stone age would write code without IntelliSense and refactoring tools. The next generation of developers will wonder how our generation got anything done without AI-powered assistants. If you don’t know what GitHub Copilot is all...

Bill Wilder    I gave two talks at this event the other one was on GitHub Copilot.) Always great to engage with the OG Code Camp crew at Boston Code Camp. My talk description: Haven’t heard about DORA yet? You will. The annual DevOps Research and Assessment Report affectionately known as the DORA Report is [&]

Bill Wilder    I gave two talks at this event the other one was on DORA.) Always great to engage with the OG Code Camp crew at Boston Code Camp. My talk description: According to legend, programmers back in the stone age would write code without IntelliSense and refactoring tools. The next generation of...

Bill Wilder    08-Aug-2023 I gave an extended demo of GitHub Copilot at the Boston Azure AI event tonight. Most of the session was a demo, but I did also walk through some slides. Those slides are attached. I also showed these links or services:

Bill Wilder    On 27-June-2023 at our first back-from-the-pandemic in-person regularly scheduled Boston Azure monthly meeting, the main event featured Juan Pablo Garcia Gonzalez from Microsoft talking about Azure OpenAI ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers. Juan Pablo was kind enough to share his slides and...

Bill Wilder    13-May-2023 Veronika Kolesnikova, Jason Haley, and myself jointly hosted the Boston Azure edition of Global Azure Bootcamp. It was a sold out show excellent turnout (around 50 participants). I presented a couple of segments, one of which was to inspire use of AI tools. For that I gave a demo of...

Bill Wilder    Today at the 34th edition of Boston Code Camp (#boscc) I presented (in person yahoo ) my talk Exploring DORA Using data to drive better outcomes which introduced the DORA project. DORA is short for the DevOps Report Assessment and provides a research-backed assessment of how your technical, process...

Bill Wilder    I had the opportunity to speak at the 2022 Granite State Code Camp in Manchester, NH. The last couple of years I was more focused on Security and Compliance-enablement in Microsoft Azure. This year I focused on Robustness. When running in Azure like other distributed system environments failures...

Bill Wilder    Today I had the opportunity to speak at the Granite State Code Camp (#GSCC2021) in Manchester, NH. This was the first time I’ve given an in-person talk since the start of COVID and it was great to see so many smiling facing (even when partially obscured by a mask ). Last year my focus was a more [&]

Bill Wilder    Tonight I had the opportunity to speak at #VirtualBostonAzure to talk about raising the visibility of security signals in your environment by turning on your WAF. In demos the WAF available in Azure Front Door was used. Slides: YouTube: https: www.youtube.com watch?v OWXTtCUNmes&feature youtu.be

Bill Wilder    Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak at the Granite State Code Camp (#gscc) in Burlington, MA. As part of my series of talks on Running Azure Securely, my talk today was around defense in depth and was called Running Azure Securely - which of these Azure security features are for me?. The...

Bill Wilder    On 22-Oct-2019 I spoke at Boston Azure about network security and focused on some of the edges of using Azure DNS, and included some DNS subdomain hijacking awareness. The command dig CNAME bostonazuredemo.azuresecurely.com short will check public DNS records for a CNAME, returning whatever it is...

Bill Wilder    Today I had the opportunity to speak at VT Code Camp #11 in Burlington, VT. As part of my series of talks on Running Azure Securely, my talk today was around defense in depth and was called Running Azure Securely which of these Azure security features are for me?. The session was interactive,...

Bill Wilder    Today I had the opportunity to speak at SQL Saturday #877 in Burlington, MA. As part of my series of talks on Running Azure Securely, my talk today was Running Azure SQL Database Securely and applied to Azure SQL DB and Azure SQL DB Managed Instances. Some Resources Mentioned Azure is in 54 regions...

Bill Wilder    On Tuesday July, 30, 2019 I had the opportunity to speak at North Boston Azure. The talk was part of a series on Running Azure Securely and was called Are all these Azure security features for me? and was not really a talk in that it was highly interactive. For those who attended, you will [&]

Bill Wilder    We had a great event at MIT on Saturday 27-April-2019 the Boston Azure edition of the Global Azure Bootcamp hosted at MIT. There were lots of great session contributions making this a true community effort. ORGANIZERS Big thank you to local organizers Olimpia ( olimpiaestela), Veronika (...

Bill Wilder    Ever try to figure out how to track who logged into your Azure SQL database? You checked all the usual ways you might handle that with a SQL Server database, but one-by-one find out they just don’t work. Here’s one way to do it. To track who is logging into your Azure SQL database, enable [&]

Bill Wilder    At most recent Boston Azure meeting I give (what turns out to be&) the first part of a multi-part talk on Running Azure Securely. Even though I did not cover all this content, I’ve attached the whole powerpoint deck below. BostonAzure-RunningAzureSecurely-BillWilder-2018-Oct-18 Please watch for a...

Bill Wilder    At the 29th Boston Code Camp, I spoke about Running Securely on Azure. Thanks to all of you who waited patiently for the A V hookup challenges to be overcome. Slides are here: BostonCodeCamp-RunningAzureSecurely-BillWilder-2018-Apr-07

Bill Wilder    On Tuesday evening 27-Mar-2018 I had the pleasure of speaking to the Nashville Azure group about keeping workloads safe in the Azure cloud. Was a great group with a lot of interesting questions and dialog. They even helped to answer each others’ questions when I didn’t have answers, which is the...

Bill Wilder    Spoke today to a small crowd of hardy soles who braved the snow to make it to SQL Saturday 694 Providence held at nearby Bryant University in Smithfield. My slides are included below. Azure SQL DB Not Just A Cloud Version of SQL Server SQL Saturday RI 09-Dec-2017

Bill Wilder    We first looked at how we might solve a random StackOverflow question using Azure Logic Apps, Azure Function Apps, the nifty PhantomJsCloud.com service, and a look at how a little Cognitive Service action could be woven in. A random walk around other Azure features followed. Some reactions were...

Bill Wilder    This past weekend I participated in SQL Saturday BI Boston in Burlington, MA. I spoke about Azure SQL Database, explaining why Azure SQL Database is much more than just a hosted version of SQL Server. The slides I presented are here: Azure SQL DB Not Just A Cloud Version of SQL Server SQL [&]

Bill Wilder    Tonight I spoke at the North Boston Azure group and covering serverless concepts by looking at Logic Apps, Function Apps, and a couple of powerful easy features of Web Apps (authentication via AAD Twitter & CD via Github). Before I posted the slides (see below), I needed to clean up the 1000 emails...

Bill Wilder    Tonight I was pleased to have the opportunity to demystify Azure Logic Apps & Functions for the Granite State SharePoint Users Group. Here is the slide deck I used to present: Serverless Azure Logic Apps and Functions Granite State SharePoint Users Group 07-Sep-2017 By the time I turned off the...

Bill Wilder    Last night’s Boston Azure meetup featured two talks No App Left Behind by Kevin Brown of SoftNAS after an opening talk on Logic Apps by me. My slides are below. Serverless Azure Logic Apps Boston Azure 06-Sep-2017 I did not have time to show it, but the Slack Email process did [&]

Bill Wilder    Last night’s Boston Azure meeting featured Marija Strazdas from AlertLogic who spoke about the Shared Security Model for security in the cloud. I also showed in more detail some of the tools that Azure provides to help customers with their side of the responsibility model including some with Azure...

Bill Wilder    Today at PowerShell in Action I spoke twice about not going TOO far in your PowerShell when managing Azure resources. The point of the talks wasn’t really that using PowerShell is bad wrong, more that it might not be the best tool for the job in certain scenarios. In particular, an ARM template is...

Bill Wilder    Last night I spoke at the North Boston Azure cloud group, where the topic was Azure SQL Database - not just a cloud version of SQL Server. So much of the talk was interactive a really high-energy discussion big thanks to Jason for hosting me and to the group for a great conversation. Here’s the...

Bill Wilder    Today the amazing Boston technology community put on their 27th Boston Code Camp. As usual, there were tons of great talks. I presented twice. Materials are below. Talk #1: 2FA, MFA, 2SA, OTP, RFP, OMG, WTF? How MFA works. Deck #1: BostonCodeCamp27-MFA-BillWilder-2017-Mar-25 Talk #2: 18 Specific...

Bill Wilder    Spoke earlier today at SecureWorld Boston on Using Public Cloud Platforms to Increase Enterprise Security. Deck is below: SecureWorld Boston 2017 Bill Wilder Improving Enterprise Security with the Public Cloud PUBLISHED

Bill Wilder    Thanks Zoran for having me back again this year as a guest lecturer to help ensure your students don’t think AWS is the only cloud in the sky Here is the deck I went (partially) through: harvard-28-oct-2016 At the end I attempted to show how I could use the CLI from my macbook to clean up [&]