I'm installing Platform Builder 3.0 so I can do some legacy support and when it prompted for Disk 10 it occurred to me that those of us who bitch about how long it takes to install Studio 2003 need to do a sanity check.  Remember the days when Office was something like 30 1.44 floppies?

Thank goodness for Virtual PC - I'll only have to do this once.  If you're a developer and not familiar with VPC, go check it out.  I think it gives Studio competition as one of the top productivity tools for developers.  Hell, I have half a dozen PCs without having to buy all the hardware, and it's easy to load to a known configuration.

Well we started the coding competition a few weeks ago now, and the suspense is killing me.  We seem to have a lot of interest (over 4000 hits on the main Wiki page for the competition) but since it'll be a while until submissions start coming in I've got no idea how successful this is going to be.  Is anyone actually writing something for it?

In case you've missed the news, Neil and I are doing a Webcast this Wednesday on MSDN.  If you're using the SDF, send us a screen shot and we'll try to include it somewhere in the presentation.

Actually I hope it goes well.  I started out putting together the PPT, but then I got sidetracked with some major shakeup at my day job, and then my home PC died (I think the power supply on the motherboard crapped as it won't even BIOS post) and I've not had the time or the cash to get back on it.  I feel bad stranding Neil like that, though I've seen him pull some amazing stuff out in short order, so I'm sure it'll all go well.  Basically if it goes great, as I expect, Neil gets all the credit.

Well it seems that the response so far has been overwhelming for the competition.  We've had some great additional software license donations (thanks to GUI Innvotions, In The Hand, IDSS and IntelliProg) and and even $300 cash so we'll be opening up some new categories.  I need two things:

1. What categories would you like to see?
2. What cool stuff should we buy with the $300?

Well I shut down commenting a while ago due to blog spammers.  I'm turning them back on and we'll see if it remains a problem.

Peter Foot has donated 4 copies of the InTheHand Pocket Outlook library and Alex Yakhnin has donated a couple Intelliprog RAS component licenses as well.

If this keeps up we'll have to add another category or two to the .NET Compact Framework Coding Competition.  Any suggestions?

This is worth a watch.