I am very happy to announce the .NET Day 2017 in Switzerland! In this blog post I want to give you a small background information on this, how this idea came up and about the current status.

The beginning

The idea of this conference day came into my mind in the middle of 2016. I love conferences. I think that a developer has to stay updated on his well known topics as well as be open to new topics and has to keep on learning over and over again. If he wants to stay open and focused on the same time he has to take a look whats new, what is established and learn from others. If you listen to a talk on a conference, on a usergroup or whereever: You get an idea of if you are interested in this topic or not. You see if you want to dig deeper or not. In a very short amount of time. And if you already know: you can see whats new, other perspectives and so on. This is worth a lot.

In addition to that Microsoft came up with a lot of new stuff during the last time. And I think beside the awesome TechDays in Switzerland there should be another paltform to spread this knowledge. But I did not want to make a commercial conference. This thing should be community driven. The focus is on spreading knowledge. The new stuff.

After a few thoughts and conversations the idea grew and I fixed a name and a date and I could go ahead organising speakers.

To mention this: I never organsied a conference before. I had no idea what to be done, no idea how to start with that thing. But Microsoft helped me a lot with this. They offered the room and helped me where they could as well as forcing me to take care about stuff with “Do it as you like”.

After a while I realized that I could not do this on my own. So I asked my friend Manuel Meyer for help. He immediately said yes and there we are:

How it grew

Through a great community and platforms like papercall.io we started a call for paper to get the speakers and the talks. IMHO we got a great agenda and speakers now (which I am not telling because I am part of it. I really do not count myself to the top speakers we have there. I am more than proud to be in between this international known names to who every single one I am looking up to).

After a while we got the agenda fixed and also Manuels and my shared OneNote grew and grew ;-).

We walked further and organsied sponsors. Some emails went out never getting any response back. But some of them came back loving the idea and they wanted to support us with the bigger one of the sponsoring packages. Great! So this grew, too.

The Event

The .NET Day takes place in Wallisellen at the Microsoft Office. It is focussing on the latest topics like Azure, the .NET Standard or ASP.NET Core and Angular.

You can see the website here .NET Day Switzerland.

We only have one day, one track as we wanted to start small and see if the feedback is good. If so: Perhaps we will do this again! If the feedback is bad then we at least tried to do this and hopefully had a good day. We will analyse it and see what we can make better the mext time if there is a next time then.

Current status

Right now we are still searching for sponsors. The more sponsors we have the more we can do about merchandising such as shirts, lanyards etc. Focus is on paying the food for everyone. On the other side we “sold” all tickets. It is really sold out. I would have never thought that.

I think it is all prepared for a good day.

Things to say more important than anything else

T H A N K S to everybody who was involved in this so far. Thank you Manuel, I could not have done this that far without you, thanks to all speakers and everyone I had to reject because the agenda was full, thank you for every retweet, for every email, every phone call! You are amazing. We will try to give everything back making this day a great great conference.

See you soon.

Fabian