Two lucky coders and one blogger will attend PDC for free, but none of them will be me :( Nevertheless, it was fun competing and having a deadline really pushed me to finally release something.

So now it's out - I have been playing with the idea for quite some time, developed most of it during last year, then abandoned it for almost half a year only to refactor and change a lot more than I expected before attaching a GUI onto the download engine I thought I had. If you'd love to use BitTorrent but absolutely must have a .NET solution, you can try NTorrent now - just head on to the Channel9 PDC contest and download my entry. I will soon publish here a version that does not require Shareware Starter Kit and that is further improved. The contest pushed me over to .NET 2.0 so I'm afraid that will be mandatory.

Speaking of coding contests, Mike Gunderloy is having one over at Larkware. Mike is actually very bold and was teasing Microsoft yesterday:

I note that Microsoft only managed 16 entries to a contest giving away a trip to the PDC. So here's a challenge to the Larkware community: I'll bet we can get more entries than that for the Larkware 2005 Developer Tool Programming Contest.

No disrespect Mike but I think that this contest is a bit contradictory.

First of all, just like with Channel9 contest it is required that all the entries be freely downloadable. This rules out any kind of serious development, if we don't count some kind of crippled version of a regular product. Second, the deadline is short - nobody can develop anything serious with a tool that is still in a beta in two months (I should know, been struggling with beta 2 bugs quite a bit). Thus I conclude that the only entries will be from single developers working on their "for fun" projects at home, after work.

But if we look at the prizes they are all what is known as enterprise class software, stuff for teams or unlimited site licenses. It might have high nominal value in dollars, but it has very little value to me as a single developer of a future microISV. Therefore I find it hard to motivate myself to apply and I think others might come to the same conclusion too. On the other hand, a trip to PDC has just right value for this kind of competition even if it has lower nominal dollar value. So I wouldn't laugh just yet ;)

In any case I would still recommend people to compete if they have something already and feel the itch to try Visual Studio 2005. I learned  a lot while porting my app and by the time Visual Studio 2005 ships it will take me no time to adjust - I already have.