Three Silverlight Contests Hath September

There are three Silverlight contests in the month of September.  Each is, interestingly, sponsored by a different set of control vendors.

Due September 14th (link): Telerik Silverlight Contest – Telerik is offering a $500 Amazon gift card for a two page written case study of an application that uses their RadControl suite.  According to the contest announcement, you must:

1. Build an application with the RadControls for Silverlight (you can even use the trials)
2. Create a 1 – 2 page case study describing your project
3. Submit the case study by September 14th, 2009

Due September 19th (link): DevExpress, Infragistics and Telerik are putting up prizes for a contest hosted at www.gosilverlight.org. You must write a Silverlight control to enter the contest. First prize has a combined award of $700 in gift cards as well as licenses for the control suites of each of the sponsors.  The Silverlight Show is also a sponsor.  According to the contest announcement, you must:

1. Controls must be designed to work with Silverlight 2 or later. Silverlight 1 Entries will not be accepted or evaluated.

2. All entries must be received between now and 12:00 AM ET, 9/19/2009 12:00:00 AM. Entries received after this date will not be accepted or evaluated. The deadline may change at any time for any reason.

3. Contestants must provide the control source code as part of the submission. The source code should be provided as a ZIP archive and should include the following items:

• A single Visual Studio 2008 Solution containing each of the solution projects.
• A Silverlight Application project that contains the custom control.
• A Test Silverlight Web Project that will host the Silverlight control. The host web project must demonstrate the control in use.
• The code must compile. If the code does not compile, the entry will not be evaluated.

See the contest rules page for a complete list of instructions.

Due September 22nd (link): ComponentArt is also hosting a Silverlight contest in September for Silverlight applications.  The Grand Prize in this contest is $10,000. 

• The use of ComponentArt products is not required to participate in the Summer Silverlight Coding Competition. The contest is open to the entire Silverlight developer community.

• Each Entry must be a Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 2.0 or Silverlight 3.0 application. Each Entry must be accessible through a public URL. If authentication is required, a demo username and password must be provided.

• The Entry must not contain any content or material that is obscene, sexually explicit, defamatory, or otherwise inappropriate as determined by ComponentArt at its absolute discretion.

• Each Entrant will be required to provide their full name, email address, physical address, and country of residency.

• ComponentArt employees are not eligible to participate in the Competition.

• Each Entry must be of the Entrant’s original creation, created solely by the Entrant(s), must not infringe the copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other intellectual rights of any person or entity.

• Participants using third party libraries, controls and/or code in their application, are required to identify the applicable third party components.

See the contest page for a full list of rules.

I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable suggesting that anyone slack off from their day jobs for this.  At the same time, however, the incentive has never been better to take a week off and hone your Silverlight skills.

I don’t see any rules that disallow submitting the same basic project for all three contests — hence tripling your chances of winning something — so here’s a sample strategy for doing that:

1. Start working on a cool Silverlight app for the ComponentArt contest.

2. Along the way, you will need to build some cool controls.  Take the coolest one and submit it for the gosilverlight.org contest.

3. Rewrite your application using some Telerik controls and submit a write-up for the Telerik Silverlight contest.

If by some chance you manage to win all three September contests, you will have made $11,200 as well as control suites worth an additional $3000 or so.  Really not so bad for a couple of weeks worth of work.