This Week on C9: VS 2010 Beta 1, Windows API Code Pack, & a WPF Jukebox

I'm spending parts of this weekend using VS 2010 for an upcoming Coding4Fun project. So far, I'm definitely liking it, and of course I have it installed on a Win 7 RC+ build with a new Office build, so I'm pushing my luck

I'm not sure we'll have another, primarily because I think Microsoft is doing way too many contests, especially developer contests. Here's a rant from me before on the subject -  http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2008/03/17/microsoft-the-contest-machine.aspx, but on average, Microsoft is doing 1 contest a week for the whole year!!

How crazy is that?!  It seems like such a gigantic waste of resources, to do 50+ small contests versus, say 5-10 bigger ones. In any case, I'm trying to help stem the tide and the one contest I personally help with is the Show Off contest, which always has amazing entries. We'll be doing it again for PDC this year, and it would be cool if we could find some way to integrate that into C9 (online voting?).

What I would like to do though, is have Microsoft sponsored open source projects. You could say we do this to some extent today, but this would be a bit more formalized where people would submit an idea for an open source utility, application, whatever (ex: .NET video processing library that can run in Silverlight), and we would subsidize the project and ensure that the project is maintained, bugs are fixed, etc.

In any case, apologies for the rant, I just wish Microsoft would be a lot more coordinated in our contest efforts and really think about what we want to do with them, versus the ad hoc, "every-team-has-a-contest" approach we currently have.

My .02,
-Dan

Shaggygi - I don't know any for VS 2010, but for VS 2008, yes, Check out AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft, a project I'm the coordinator for, that shows how to build a totally custom IDE for building AddOns for World of Warcraft. It includes a visual designer, project system, SVN support (using AnkhSVN), properties window, IntelliSense, Debugging, syntax colorization/highlighting, Snippets, etc.