How about each week pick some broad guidelines of a simple app or utility where site members can vote on a winner? Sort of like http://www.worth1000.com has for graphics designers.

Each program has to be under a certain size, written in a specific (.net) language, or can be limited by lines of code (specific rules for c# coders where a semicolon is the end of the line). Do to the possible unsafe nature of posting executables to be judged, entrants would just post the source code (also creating a nice little sample code library reference). They could award points which could be saved up for MS swag or software.

Seeing how bilingualism is a big deal here for any government or other public-sector shop, perhaps there could be some sort of contest on creating bilingual winforms applications and web applications.

-JP (Ottawa)

How about a Darwinian style kill or be killed bot war that works sort of like Risk/Global War?

Bots have to play by the rules of Risk and win. Full tournment play with the winner being the one that wins the play down in typical double elimination style.

Take the tildy off to email me :)

As a coder who loves to think code all the time, but has very little time to do much more than fits and spurts of my own hobby stuff as i get the chance, the biggest problem i know i face is learning all the different possibile ways of doing things, and discovering the best way.

So i think a comp that went one step better than a different style of program each week would be really worthwhile - and probably to many people, if you make the source of the submissions web-viewable: the snippet competition.

The way i see it, provide a small (yet complexish) problem, and find the best implementors of the sulution. For example, provide a list of, say, 1000 different things, a mixture of string, numbers, and ...dates, say. Now, how would you about about sorting these? This, for example, would get submissions of bubble sort, btrees, soem clever person might discover that all the strings generate the lowest GetHashCode() values (this i've made up :)

You can judge for the most innovative solution, the one that runs the fastest (takes the least clock-cycles), the one that is best obfuscated...etc.

Little problems that, potentially, can allow a hell of a lot to be learned for a lot of people, and perhaps some nice new inventions will come a long too.

Just a thought :)

--Geoff

I'll second Geoff's idea of keeping these contests simple and achievable. Of course, they can't be so simple that they don't give us a challenge :)

Perhaps one thing we could is offer different contests with different levels of difficulty: beginner, intermediate and advanced.

For instance, a beginner challenge would be to create a simple winform that connects to a back end web service.

The intermediate challenge would be to create a bilingual version of the above winform.

The advanced challenge would be to create a multi-threaded version of the above winform.

Just my two cents,

Sacha (Ottawa also)

I would like to see one for SharePoint Web Parts.

How about a contest to see who can add features to the various starter kits that have been released? (i.e. Community Starter Kit, Reports Starter Kit, etc)

You could just ask for general submissions or list a feature and it's up to the developers to mplement the feature somehow.

How about the a .net compiler contest?

How about a contest for Office 2003 Solutions - ie. InfoPath schemas, Information Bridge, Sharepoint Integration. Something that can showcase the end-to-end strength of the MS Product offerings.

How about a Summer of Express Canada where it is restricted to Canadians only? It could even be ongoing with a prize awarded monthly, previous winners would be ineligible for 3 months and could not submit a program in the same language which fulfills the same use (can't submit a second RSS aggregator if already submitted one which one). However, after their 3 months, they could then convert their app to another language (VB to a web app) and resubmit it, however it would be likely not to rate as high for originality).

The top 5 picked by a judge could be posted where visitors can vote on the winner (registered by email, one email one vote). The top 5 could also get critiqued by the judge which could showcase the reasons they were chosen (unique idea, good example of storing XML in SSE, easy to read code).

Hmmm, maybe a community site like this might be a good project for somebody to enter for the Channel 9 Summer of Express contest themselves.