Maarten Balliauw

Maarten Balliauw loves building web and cloud apps. His main interests are in .NET web technologies, C#, Microsoft Azure and application performance. He is Head of Customer Success at Duende Software. Creator and maintainer of https://speaker.travel. He's an ASP Insider and former Microsoft MVP. Maarten is a frequent speaker at various national and international events and organizes Azure User Group events in Belgium. In his free time, he brews his own beer.

Montreal 2027 sessions

Middleware You Didn't Know You Needed

English session - Beginner

ASP.NET Core's middleware pipeline is one of the most elegant parts of the framework, yet most of us only use the defaults. Thing is, there's a bunch of built-in middleware that ships with ASP.NET Core but isn't wired up by default.

In this session, we'll explore these overlooked middlewares, understand when to use (and when to avoid) each one, and build a few custom middleware components live on stage.

What's in a Token? Dissecting auth cookies and JWTs in .NET

English session - Beginner

What's inside that (sometimes chunky) authentication cookie in an ASP.NET Core application? Why is your JWT 4KB and growing? And why does login break the moment you add one more claim?

We'll decode JWTs by hand, inspect the ASP.NET Core authentication cookie byte by byte, watch token negotiation happen in real-time with browser DevTools, and debug the kind of auth issues that make you clear all cookies in frustration.