Xiaodi Yan
Microsoft MVP
Wellington, New Zealand
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Xiaodi Yan is a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) who specializes in Developer Technologies and AI services. He is also a software developer, a community contributor, a speaker, and an organizer of local meetups in New Zealand. He has more than 20 years of experience with software development.
Active in the New Zealand tech ecosystem, Xiaodi leads the Wellington .NET User Group, connecting developers from across the region to share knowledge and best practices. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences and meetups such as Code Camp Wellington, Cloud Native Summit, and other global developer events, where he shares real-world insights on AI, .NET, DevOps, and cloud-native applications.
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From LLMs to Agentic Systems: Building Domain-Expert Agents with Microsoft Agent Framework
Agentic AI is quickly becoming the next evolution of application development—but building agents that are actually useful in real-world scenarios requires more than just plugging into an LLM.
In this session, we’ll explore how to use the Microsoft Agent Framework to build domain-aware, production-ready AI agents using the concept of Agent Skills. Instead of relying on generic reasoning, Agent Skills enable agents to gain structured domain expertise, making them more reliable, controllable, and enterprise-ready.
We’ll walk through:
What the Microsoft Agent Framework is and how it fits into the modern AI stack
The concept of Agent Skills and how they differ from tools and plugins
How to design and implement reusable, composable skills
Integrating agents with Azure services for real-world scenarios
Best practices for building scalable and maintainable agentic systems
By the end of this session, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to move from simple LLM-based apps to robust, domain-specific agent systems using Azure and Microsoft’s latest agent tooling.
From F5 to Production: Rethinking the Local Dev Experience with Aspire
Most of us are used to pressing F5 and running a single service locally.
But modern applications are distributed systems — and they’re increasingly polyglot.
In this session, I’ll share my recent hands-on experience using Aspire in a real project, and how it changed the way I think about local development for cloud-native applications — even beyond the .NET ecosystem.
We’ll explore how Aspire simplifies running and wiring multiple services, managing dependencies, and getting observability out of the box. While Aspire started in the .NET world, it now also supports non-.NET workloads such as Python, making it a compelling option for teams building mixed-stack systems.
I’ll walk through practical examples, live demos, and the lessons learned along the way — including what Aspire does well, where it falls short, and when it may not be the right fit.
If you’ve ever struggled to make your local development environment feel closer to production, this talk will give you a fresh and realistic perspective on what’s possible with Aspire today.
From Prompts to Agents: Unleashing AI with Prompt Engineering, RAG, Function Calling, and MCP
In this session, we will take you on a journey through the evoltion of human-AI inteaction --- from the art of crafting effective prompts and leveraging retrieval argmented generation (RAG), to the structured function calling and intelligent agents that orchestrate complex tasks, and finally to the emreging Model Context Protocol (MCP). Learn how these components work together to tranform natural language into the next-generation AI solutions.
Introduction to IaC with Azure
What is IaC (Infrastructure as code) and what is the benefit of it? We will introduce the ways to implement IaC in Azure with ARM, Bicep and Terraform, and understand what they are. We will also show some cases to help you get started.
Serverless application with Functions, Blazor and Static Web Apps
How would you build your serverless application? Check out how we integrate Functions/Blazor/Static Web Apps together
Build Web Apps on Container by Azure DevOps Pipelines
Introduction for Azure DevOps and demonstrate how to leverage Azure DevOps to build the web app for Azure Web Apps on Container.
Consuming Azure Cognitive Services in your modern application
Demonstrate how to integrate Cognitive Services in your modern applications, such as web and mobile.
Introduction to Severless: Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps
In this session, we’ll cover the world of Azure Functions, starting with an explanation of the servers behind serverless, exploring the languages and integrations available.
Global Azure 2022 Sessionize Event
Virtual Azure Community Day Sessionize Event
Virtual Azure Community Day Sessionize Event
Global Azure 2020 Sessionize Event
Global AI Bootcamp Wellington 2019 Sessionize Event
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