Today we published the agenda for the 2017 DevPartner Conference which will take place in Atlanta, GA the week of Monday May 8th; we hope you can join us. The main conference will be a three-day event from Tuesday May 9th through Thursday May 11th. And similar to other recent conferences we will be offering both pre- and post-conference workshops on Monday 8th and Friday 12th respectively. I will be hosting the pre-conference workshop entitled “Building RESTful Web Services with Synergy .NET and ASP.NET Web API”. My colleague Richard Morris will be presenting the post-conference seminar entitled “Building Platform-Independent Mobile Apps with Xamarin Forms”. Of course we hope you can join us for both workshops, but for the remainder of this article I will be focusing on providing information about the pre-conference RESTful web services workshop.

Building and implementing web service APIs isn’t exactly new, but there are definitely some new and exciting technologies in play that can make building, deploying and interacting with web services faster, easier and more powerful than ever. With the relentless increase in demand for mobile applications and solutions the requirement to expose web service APIs is greater than ever. Not that web service API’s are only used to support mobile applications, that is certainly is not the case. In fact almost any new application developed today is likely to either require the use of a web service API, or it will just make sense to architect the application that way for increased flexibility and future-proofing.

I’m developing the content for my workshop right now and I wanted to give you some information about the audience that I am targeting, which is very broad. To be honest, unless you are already implementing RESTful web service APIs then this workshop is for you! And even if you ARE already implementing RESTful web services APIs, but with some technology other than ASP.NET Web API, then this workshop is also for you! In my opinion it is really important that every developer have at least a good understanding of what a RESTful web service APIs are and how they can be used, and it sure doesn’t hurt to know how to build them either! This workshop will teach you all of those things, and more.

We will start with the basics and will not assume any previous knowledge of web services. After an introductory presentation there will be lots of code, so you will need to be comfortable with that. I don’t want to just show you how to build a RESTful web service API, I want you to really understand what it is and how it works. So as well as covering ASP.NET Web API we will also be talking about the basic principles of REST, as well as various underlying technologies like HTTP, JSON and XML. If it all works out as planned it should be an action packed and interesting day.

This year both of the full-day workshops will be lecture and demonstration based; there won’t be any hands-on component. Unfortunately the hardware and software requirements of the underlying technologies that we will be using, particularly in the post-conference workshop, make it virtually impossible for us to offer a hands-on experience this time around. But rest assured that you will have access to all of the code that is developed and demonstrated, and we’ll make sure that you know exactly what hardware and software you will need if you want to work with that code, or perform your own similar development projects.

Time is ticking away and DevPartner 2017 is only about 10 weeks away. We’re all looking forward to seeing you again, or meeting you for the first time, and if you haven’t done so already then it’s time to register. See you there!