Saturday, October 30, 2010

Free Not For Resale MSDN Subscription up for grabs!!





I have in my possession a Not For Resale Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN Subscription, and it's up for grabs. Like all other Microsoft MVPs I had 3 to give away, I have given away 2 already but now I have just 1 left.

So I can't think who to give it to as the two lucky people that received this free subscription were the only ones that I know of who wanted to get into programming or wanted to move to Visual Studio 2010 and the 2010 wave of Microsoft products. Most of the people I know receive Visual Studio 2010 as part of their corporate MSDN licence provided by the company they work for.

I thought about who to give this to and I couldn't really think of anyone that I thought really derserves it. So instead I took an idea from what some other MVPs have been doing and that is to present a challenge to the community and the best or the right answer wins the MSDN subscription! That's fair don't you think...


The Challenge

As I am passionate about Technical Architecture and good clean code and the fact I have done lots of code reviews in my career, I thought the challenge could be around best coding practice or the best example of clean maintainable easy to understand code.

So the challenge is really: write an application for the new Windows Phone 7 Series device using the new free tools (Visual Studio 2010 Express with Windows Phone 7 Series) that promotes good architectural design.

The things I'm looking for and this will greatly increase your chance of winning are as follows:

  1. Good OO, pay attention to the single responsibility principle. No procedural code
  2. Code must be maintainable
  3. Easy to understand
  4. Good system design patterns such as, command, MVVM, MVP, repository etc
  5. Good code coverage (doesn't need to be 100%) but if used will make achieving 1, 2 and 3 on this list a lot more likely
  6. You'll get extra marks if you make use of the IoC container I checked in to codeplex: http://wp7.codeplex.com/ - note that project is targeting the Beta tools of Windows Phone 7, I haven't got round to updating it yet but it should work with the RTM release of Windows phone

So..... the ultimate question you're probably asking is, what application should you write? well it doesn't matter. It could be an application as simple as a calculator to something that makes use of networking or Windows Azure for example. The person that wins this will be win it based on good architecture code design.

You've got until Tue 26th November to get something to me to review. Then I'll announce the winner before the end of November. The subscription does expire soon which is why I'm only giving about 3-4 weeks to do this.

Send submissions to simon (at) simonrhart (dot) com. If you have any questions then leave a comment on this post.

Happy coding!!

3 comments:

Simon Hart said...

Come on people!! don't be shy, so far I have 0 submissions..

Anonymous said...

Hi Simon,

do you still have this license? I am looking exactly for this as an ambitioned amateur software developer using vb.net, c# and f#.

Thanks for a reply,

Wolfgang (from Germany)

Simon Hart said...

Wolfgang,

Why should I give it to you?

Simon