[DotGNU]System.Windows.Forms Coding Competition

[Norbert Bollow]

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In 2003 a "DotGNU Collaborative Coding Competition" was held with a
goal of encouraging more contributions to the System.Windows.Forms
(WSF) part of the C# class libraries for DotGNU Portable.NET.

Unfortunately we failed to attract new contributors to the project
through this compatition, and only one competion entry was
submitted. This competion entry was valid, and the contributor (Rich
Baumann) has therefore won a price. (He has received a check from the
FSF). There is however a significant part of the donated prize money
still unclaimed and we plan to relaunch the competition in early 2005.

I think there's good reason to hope that we'll have better success
with the competition this time around.  We have new contacts in India
where Gopal recently had a big success at the "Linux Bangalore"
conference with his demo of pnet winforms on the Simputer (an Indian
handheld running Linux on a StrongARM CPU) less than 72 hours after
the release of the GNU/Linux port for that platform at the same
conference (they were very impressed with how quickly Gopal had
ported pnet).  We can offer prizes in the competition which certainly
represent a lot of money when compared to entry-level salaries for
programmers in India.  (Of course the competition isn't going to be
limited to India, the point here is just that there _are_ programmers
within our reach for whom the prizes which we can offer will be very 
attractive.)

Probably a major problem with the original coding competition was
that the goal to "complete Windows.Forms" was too far away
psychologically.  Potential contributors wouldn't know where to start.

For this reason I want to publish a roughly-prioritized list of
specific missing functionality or other problems in our SWF so that
potential participants in the competition can easily find something
worthwhile to work on.

Here is my appeal to everyone who is currently writing application
programs which use System.Windows.Forms:

  Please mail me (either on-list or off-list) with specific requests
  for what you'd think would be cool if someone did it as part of the
  competition.

  Feel free to be very selfish!  If some SWF feature would be cool
  for your app, that's a good reason to include it on the list.

Greetings, Norbert.


P.S. The possibilty of winning prize money in this coding competition
is restricted to volunteer contributors; the people who are currently
doing paid work on commercial projects involving System.Windows.Forms,
are excluded because they're getting paid already.  Naturally the
members of the DotGNU Steering Committee and the donor of the prize
money are also excluding themselves.



- -- 
Founder & Steering Committee member of DotGNU, see http://dotgnu.org/
Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59        Fax +41 1 972 20 69       http://norbert.ch
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