Title explains it well. I thought it would be nice if we could have some competition with eachother using .NET (and related technologies) and come up with a specific project that we can each build, and the winner could be decided by a mentor/moderator/ect. So, what do you guys think?
I have to agree with wwb_99. Based on the entry rate in the last competition, I think we’d be hard pushed to get buy in. If you can prove otherwise, I’m all ears. 
The idea I had was to not involve a prize, but to have Bragging Rights on the .NET Forum. It would help build portfolio under certain guidlines and time constraints, like an actual job. Yeah, wwb, I saw you won the Programming Competition, good job, but this would just be for the .NET guys (and girls) and not be related to SitePoint or a Feature they need on their site. Anyways, it was just a fun idea I had, sorry for the confusion.
There would have to be a prize. 
OK, I’m in. Me against you! 
Gotcha, no worries. In any case, you’ve got some of the same problems to solve that SitePoint staff does vis-a-vis programming contests.* The trick is it needs to be meaty and interesting enough to get good answers while being constrained and limited enough for someone to tackle in a reasonable amount of time. Limiting it to .NET definitely helps as it levels the playing field quite a bit–some things that are very easy in .NET (eg–XML Serialization) are difficult on other platforms and vice-versa. You also need to sort through different people’s idea of what is a good contest. IE–is data interchange cool? Or should we focus on client-side pizzaz? Finally, scoring is a pain–really, really difficult to normalize in any meaningful way.
Off Topic:
- I should note here that I wanted to have one throughout the whole period I was on staff here, I just didn’t have a good idea about how to do it so said grand scheme was never executed. But I did ponder quite a bit so this is a bit more than idle chatter.
Uhm, I won the last programming competition with ASP.NET. See http://vbulletinpm.codeplex.com/ for details.
Anyhow, my spidey sense (ie, a few years on staff) tells me that an ASP.NET programming competition would likely be a non-starter. But some good ideas for programming contests would probably help there be another one.
Sitepoint just had a programming competition. Not sure how well a competition would be for only 1 language. How much interest would there be?
What did you have in mind for a competition?
Of course, august wasn’t the best month to get an audience for a contest. At least not in Italy