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dotnet Cologne 2011 - Call for Papers
Am 6. Mai 2011 findet im MediaPark Köln die dotnet Cologne 2011 statt, die große .NET Community Konferenz in Deutschland. Bereits zum dritten Mal organisieren die .NET User Groups aus Köln und Bonn einen ganzen Tag voll mit Vorträgen rund um .NET.
Damit diese Konferenz von Entwicklern für Entwickler wieder ein solcher Erfolg wie im letzten Jahr wird, suchen wir (Stefan Lange, Albert Weinert und ich) noch Sprecher mit interessanten Vorträgen – von der Einführung in neue Themen bis hin zur Level 400 “Hardcore” Session zu etablierten Technologien.
Wer Interesse hat: Alle Infos zum Call for Papers gibt es hier.
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Welcome 2011
Things that happened in 2010
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MIX10 was absolutely fantastic. Read
my report of MIX10
to see why.
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The
dotnet Cologne 2010, the community conference organized by the
.NET user group Köln
and my own group
Bonn-to-Code.Net
became an even bigger success than I dared to dream
of.
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There was a huge discrepancy between the efforts by
Microsoft to support .NET user groups to organize
public live streaming events of the PDC
keynote
(the dotnet Cologne team joined forces with
netug Niederrhein
to organize the
PDCologne) and the actual content of the keynote. The reaction
of the audience at our event was “meh” and even worse
I seriously doubt we’ll ever get that number of people
to such an event (which on top of that suffered from
technical difficulties beyond our control).
- What definitely would have deserved the public live streaming event treatment was the Silverlight Firestarter (aka “Silverlight Damage Control”) event. And maybe we would have thought about organizing something if it weren’t for the “burned earth” left by the PDC keynote. Anyway, the stuff shown at the firestarter keynote was the topic of conversations among colleagues days later (“did you see that? oh yeah, that was seriously cool”).
Things that I have learned/observed/noticed in 2010
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In the long run, there’s a huge difference between “It
works pretty well” and “it just works and I never have
to think about it”. I had to get rid of my USB
graphics adapter powering the third monitor (read
about it in
this blog post). Various small issues (desktop icons
sometimes moving their positions after a
reboot for no apparent reasons, at least one game I
couldn’t get run at all, all three monitors
sometimes simply refusing to wake up after
standby) finally made me buy a PCIe 1x graphics
adapter. If you’re interested: The combination of a
NVIDIA GTX 460 and a GT 220 is running in “don’t make
me think” mode for a couple of months now.
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PowerPoint 2010 is a seriously cool
piece of software. Not only the new
hardware-accelerated effects, but also features like
built-in background removal and picture processing
(which in many cases are simply “good enough” and save
a lot of time) or the smart guides.
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Outlook 2010 crashes on me a lot. I
haven’t been successful in reproducing these crashes,
they just happen when every couple of days on
different occasions (only thing in common: I clicked
something in the main window – yeah, very helpful
observation)
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Visual Studio 2010 reminds me of
Visual Studio 2005 before SP1, which is actually not a
good thing to say about a piece of software. I think
it’s telling that Microsoft’s message regarding the
beta of SP1 has been different from earlier service
pack betas (promising an upgrade path for a beta to
the RTM sounds to me like “please, please use it
NOW!”).
- I have a love/hate relationship with ReSharper. I don’t want to develop without it, but at the same time I can’t fail to notice that ReSharper is taking a heavy toll in terms of performance and sometimes stability.
Things I’m looking forward to in 2011
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Obviously, the
dotnet Cologne 2011. We already have been able to score some big name
sponsors (Microsoft, Intel), but
we’re still looking for more sponsors. And be assured that we’ll make sure that our
partners get the most out of their contribution,
regardless of how big or small.
- MIX11, period.
- Silverlight 5 is going to be great. The only thing I’m a bit nervous about is that I still haven’t read anything official on whether C# next version’s async/await will be in it. Leaving that out would be really stupid considering the end-of-2011 release of SL5 (moving the next release way into the future).
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MIX10 was absolutely fantastic. Read
my report of MIX10
to see why.