The dotnet Cologne 2012

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!

The dotnet Cologne 2010

What an event! Round about 300 people met at the Holiday Inn – Am Stadtwald, Cologne. And I am sure, none of them regrets his participance.

Some of the sponsors were present with exhibition stands. For me, that was informative and useful; e.g. I took home some information about a WPF control collection which could help us to solve a problem we a currently facing in my company.

I really like these community conferences. The information given there are absolutely useful for the daily work for the speakers take their topics “from life”. Additionally, it is nice to share experiences with other participants.

dotnetCologne2010The dotnet Cologne this year was held on the occasion of the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET framework 4. So, the talks, which were organised in altogether 30 sessions and 4 tracks, more or less dealt with these two aspects. That was a quite condensed programme. Even the lunch break was used for sessions! I was this time mostly interested in parallel programming, code contracts, and some goodies of the new .NET framework.

As last year, the sessions were great due to the high expertise of the speakers! The whole conference gave you the feeling of bringing you to the technological state of the art.

What was the benefit at the end of the day? First contact to new technologies or a deeper insight into it, new programming techniques, hints for your daily work – just to name a few.

Of course, there was a raffle at the end of the conference. And you may guess right that I was one of the numerous winners – this time, it was a book.

Not only from my point of view, the conference was a great success. Thanks to the organisation team – absolutely well done (again)!