Remember that playground game, Rock, Paper, Scissors?   Well, that’s old school - it’s the 21st century, and we’re taking it to the cloud!  Today, we’re launching the Rock Paper Azure Challenge!

My colleagues Brian Hitney, Peter Laudati, Susan Wisowaty, and I have been feverishly working on what promises to be a fun (and profitable!) way of getting your feet wet with Windows Azure.  Leveraging an open source .NET project created by Aaron Jensen and hosted on github. we’ve turned it into a weekly contest (official rules here) where you can write a bit of code to play Rock, Paper, Scissors (with a few twists!) and compete against your fellow geeks for weekly prizes including an XBox 360/Kinect bundle!  There are two primary components to the challenge:

• The contest site, http://rockpaperazure.com, contains all the information you need to play including instructions on provisioning a free Azure account, downloading the code you need to play, and a schedule of weekly webcasts where we’ll talk a bit about Windows Azure and introduce you to the game.
• To work on your own killer player (or ‘bot’ as we call it), you’ll also download a small Windows Azure application with an MVC website – the BotLab – which you can use to test out your code before you actually unleash it on the world.  When you’re ready, you’ll deploy your BotLab to Windows Azure and submit your bot to the contest.  From there, watch the leaderboard and see how you fare, view the game logs, and tweak your implementation to annihilate the competition.

Our first webcast is next Tuesday, and we invite you to join us then.  For the next couple of days though, feel free to give it a whirl before we start the first official weekly round!