The “Get me MSDN Premium and Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite” competition

What’s this post about?
Microsoft gave me two licenses for the MSDN Premium and Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite. These are full subscriptions, not a kind of half baked something and each one is worth nearly $ 11,000.

I’m allowed to give them to people in the community and therefore thought to create a small competition where you can win them as grand prizes.

How to win?
Create one or more screencasts and post them as comments (a link to them and a short description) of this post. The submitted screencast should be around 15-20 minutes (it can also be longer) and cover one or more Microsoft technologies. The language of the screencast needs to be English (because that’s the language that all the judges understand).

The idea is not to advertise one of the technologies but rather to create a screencast that allows people to learn something about that technology. Examples would be: “How to create a game in XNA”, “How to use Visual Studio 2008″, “How to build a website in ASP.NET”, “How to create and style a control in Expression Blend”, or even “How to start with Visual C++”.

You can use tools like Camtasia, Community Clips or even Microsoft Media Encoder to record the screencast and upload it to YouTube or any other platform that you want. I’m mentioning YouTube because they offer the new High Quality videos. Please make sure that the screencast is of a decent quality (also after being uploaded to the web): it’s no fun to watch them if you can barely see what it’s going on!

For examples on how the final screencast could look like check out my screencast section.

Who is allowed to participate?
Everybody around the world who is a human being (and doesn’t work for Microsoft because they obviously already have the subscription) can participate at the competition. ;)

When does the competition take place?
It starts on the 1st of July 2008 and goes until the 31st of July 2008. Entries submitted within that period are taken into consideration; entries submitted outside this period are not taken into consideration!

How is the winner selected?
After the competition is over the judges (Alex Duggleby, Sven Groot and me) are going to watch the different screencasts and they are going to choose the two winners. The two people who created the best screencasts (speaking of how well they are done and how valuable they are for people who want to learn the technology that is shown in the screencast) are going to be selected as winners. The two winners get a notification and will receive the prizes.

Attention: please make sure to post your real e-mail address and name so that I can contact you if you win the prize. Please include also the country in which you life.

Submitting screencasts means that you agree with the terms and conditions mentioned in this post.

Published on Jun 28th, 2008 — Tags: , ,
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