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Summer of Express Contest Winners Announced!

  • Article

After some really tough judging, we officially have the Summer of Express contest winners! There were some awesome applications in the C# category, I was really impressed by the work and level of effort put in by all the entrants. You can download the projects on Channel9's Express Page.

 We definitely want to do this contest again, but we're thinking about changing things up and wanted to get your feedback on what makes a good contest. Here's what I've been thinking

  • Get Better prizes - This one requires a good amount of legal work far ahead of the contest, but it is doable
  • Have prizes for 1st, 2nd, 3rd for a given category - I wish I could've given prizes to the top 5 C# entries :)
  • Change the categories - Rather then be product focused, I would imagine categories like - Best Game, Best productivity tool, Best utility, Best use of the network, Best use of SQL Server, Best Web app

What do you think makes a good contest?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2004
    Unfortunately I was unable to compete in this contest, but I would love to see future competitions. Maybe rather than awarding multiple genres in each contest, give each individual contest a theme, for example, "Best Network App" or "Best Web Service". I also like the idea of having runner-up prizes. Keep up the great work!
  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2004
    On the subject of better prizes - How about to be Bill Gates' Apprentice for a year? :)

    Or more prominent recognition. I mainly entered the VWD competition for resume material. Would be nice to have professional critiques of at least the winning entries. And links to the winners off of the main msdn site.

    Other than that, it was a fun competition.

    Best Regards,
    Minh Tran
  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2004
    The tablet team had a good concept for their contests. Not only did htey up the ante (hey, how about $100,000? :-) ) but the increased the level of knowledge required at each level. So that helped encourage people first to start playing with the sdk, then go deeper and deeper with each contest. But maybe you can come up with some parameters with the mission of encouraging those same people who just entered the contest, to push themselves a little farther.
  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2004
    Good feedback, what do you all think about also adding a "People's Choice" category? We'd have to setup some code to do the voting, but I think it would be fun to see what people think :)

    -Dan
  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2004
    I'd planned to compete in the VC++ category to check out C++/CLI and MDX (yep, it would have been a game :]) but time was against me...

    Anyway, I suppose categories based on application type rather than on the tools used would make voting easier - e.g., how to decide wether the uberapp is better than the ubergame? - and would show off the freedom of choice the developer has when he targets the .NET framework.

    "People's Choice" would be definitely interesting :)
  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2004
    The comment has been removed