Wow, wow, wow. The 4th dotnet Cologne was a great event – once again! It was held at the KOMED for the second time. It is a location quite good to reach by car or public transport. 350 people met there to get information and ideas from speakers who are developers themselves. This year, a great number of the sessions dealt with the new Microsoft technologies and products such as Windows 8, WinRT, Visual Studio 2012, and SQL Server 2012. The other session topics were a mixture of agility, software technology, etc., as usual. The conference was organised in five tracks plus one additional Microsoft track. The latter comprised of sessions held by Microsoft Evangelists. Bad thing, you were spoilt for choice…
It was nice to see that JetBrains was present with a booth and two talks (on their products ReSharper and YouTrack). It was for the first time, so I went to their booth and had an interesting conversation. Anyway, talking to other participants and exhibitors is as much important as the conference sessions.
My highlight session was Rainer Stropek talking about WinRT! It was a great technical deep dive. Johannes Hofmeister shared his thoughts about Empathic Code (i.e. how code should look like with respect to readability) with us which urged me to nod the whole time. Besides that, I was interested in CQRS, some C# goodies, Windows 8 for .NET developers, and in what is new in Visual Studio 2012. Again, it was hard to pick the best sessions of that broad offering.
PS: The next dotnet Cologne is on 3 May 2013!