Typemock is proudly sponsoring the dotnet Cologne 2010 conference in Cologne, Germany on May 28th. We recently caught up with Roland Weigelt, one of its organizers, to discuss the history of the conference, the local User Group leaders who organize it, and what attendees can expect at this year’s event:
"It’s been a long road," says Roland Weigelt, when asked about his journey from fledgling technology enthusiast to professional developer. He began programming at a young age and later went on to study physics and computer science at Bonn University. "Having liked Microsoft’s J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes, I looked into .NET as soon as the first technical previews were released, starting with serious development in C# and Windows Forms when .NET 1.0 finally came out."
In 2003 Roland joined the weblogs.asp.net blogging community and began working on a little macro that eventually became GhostDoc, a hugely popular Visual Studio add-in. "It got me into contact with many people," he says, "unfortunately most of them lived halfway around the globe."
If you were a developer and living in Bonn, Germany five years ago you would have been hard-pressed to find a local User Group dedicated to .NET technologies. So in January 2006, after convincing his employer to share a conference room, Roland founded Bonn-to-Code.Net. The User Group was a hit and two of its earliest attendees, Albert Weinert and Stefan Lange, later went on to co-found .NET User Group Cologne. The three continue to cooperate in many ways — enjoying the overlap in User Group attendance and membership.
Then, in spring 2008, their cooperation reached new heights when they helped to organize the AfterLaunch conference, offering 3 tracks and 18 presentations to 150 attendees on topics related to the launch of Visual Studio 2008. They repeated the success of the AfterLaunch conference the very next year with dotnet Cologne 2009.
This year’s conference sold out in record time, despite the fact that the organizers are hosting it in a bigger venue, and will offer 4 tracks and 30 sessions to over 300 attendees. The event will focus on the "version 4" wave of technologies — Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. Attendees can expect a packed schedule and a raffle at the end of the day with lots of prizes available from local and international sponsors.
Typemock is thrilled to be a gold sponsor at this year’s conference and, in addition to Stefan Lieser’s presentation on unit testing brownfield projects — showing how Typemock Isolator can help in automating tests — we will be donating 3 Typemock Isolator licenses to the raffle and other prizes too.
I’m looking forward to attending dotnet Cologne 2010 and finally meeting so many of you face-to-face. Look for me, the loud American guy taking lots of photos, and please don’t be shy about saying hello. In the meantime, if you would like to know more about how Typemock Isolator makes unit testing easy, or if you have an event you would like us to sponsor please email me at britt [at] typemock dot com and let’s chat about it.
Britt King
