Next Wednesday, February 6, 2013, we will be celebrating the fifth anniversary of our .NET User Group in Koblenz!

[] (Media/Default/images/blog_codemurai_en/Windows-Live-Writer/5-years-.NET-User-Group-Koblenz_14B9E/CW_Detail2_2.jpg) We were able to secure Christian Weyer as our speaker and “guest of honor,” who is visiting our group for the second time. Christian will be talking about “Lightweight architectures with web APIs & push services – even beyond the web.”

By the way, we still have a few spots available, so feel free to register for the free meeting on our Xing Event page!

As always, the meeting will take place at 7 p.m. in the large conference room at the Koblenz Technology Center.

When I think back to how the .NET User Group Koblenz came into being, I find it amazing that we have actually managed to stay active for five years!

At the end of 2007, my former colleague and good friend Markus Rennings and I were attending an MCPD boot camp together. Markus and I were no longer working at the same company at the time and were feeling a little sentimental about our former internal meetings for knowledge exchange between developers. We considered whether we should encourage regular meetings between the developers of our two companies, until the idea came up:

Let’s start a User Group

The idea had been floating around in my head for quite some time, ever since I read Roland Weigelt’s Guide to Starting a User Group.

The biggest problem, however, was that neither Markus nor I had ever been to a user group meeting, so neither of us knew what actually happens at a user group meeting. Incidentally, I have still never been to any other user group meeting ;-)

So, in order to not be alone in our cluelessness, we brought another former colleague and good friend, Eric Berres, on board. Thomas Naunheim also joined us, making us four clueless user group founders.

Eric was able to convince his former boss Timo Ziegler to the idea of a user group, so that the biggest problem, namely the question of space, was resolved surprisingly quickly. Eric also set up a DotNetNuke-based homepage for our group, with Thomas contributing the design.

Incidentally, the design in 2013 is still the same original design from late 2007/early 2008.

Once the space and homepage issues had been quickly resolved, everything was hunky-dory. Except for one thing:

Where do we actually get participants and speakers from?

Well, that was quite a challenge! Until then, we had hardly any contacts in the .NET community outside our companies. So where would we find participants and speakers?

A relatively quick solution was found for the participants. Eric still had contacts at the Koblenz University of Applied Sciences and put up some advertisements there. He also knew one(!) other company in the Koblenz area and contacted the team leader there. This meant that we were able to attract around 20 participants to the first meeting, almost all of whom came from Markus’s, Eric’s, my, and the other company.

Fortunately, word got around over time that there was a .NET user group in Koblenz, so we are now also welcoming participants from other companies. However, we are still maintaining an average of 20 people.

The second problem – the speakers – had to be solved internally first. Eric gave the first presentation, introducing DotNetNuke. Jan Meinecken, Markus, and I took turns at the next meetings. However, we were able to secure our first external speaker, Roland Weigelt, relatively quickly.

However, thanks to increasing networking within the community, including membership of INETA and the Microsoft CLIP program, we were fortunately able to establish more and more contacts with other speakers, who then visited us.

 The absolute highlights for our group were definitely the international speakers Tony Lombardo, then ASP.NET MVC from New Jersey and Worldwide Lead Evangelist at Infragistics, and software legend Juval Löwy.

Of course, we also had some top German-speaking experts who certainly don’t need to hide behind their American colleagues!

Among others, we were visited by Christian Weyer, Oliver Sturm, Roland Weigelt, Torsten Weber, Lars Keller, Kiril Matev, Konstantin Klein, Markus Kissling, and Gregor Biswanger. Some, like Roland, Kostja, and Gregor, were even repeat offenders ;-)

This was, of course, only a small selection of the many volunteer speakers who have all spoken for us (free of charge!) over the past few years! On our new homepage, which we have been planning for three years, we will, of course, list all the speakers individually.

At this point, however, we would like to thank everyone who has already given a presentation for us and, of course, those without whom it would make no sense to run the group: the numerous participants!

I would also like to mention Timo Ziegler once again, who not only provided the premises in the early years and has been organizing them again for the past year, but who also took over last year as User Group Lead from Markus and Thomas, who unfortunately had to step down due to work commitments.

Visit User Groups!

In general, I would recommend every developer to visit a local user group at least once. If there isn’t one, just start one yourself ;-)