I just read in my Roy’s blog about the contest Channel9 is holding in which you can get free lodging, enterance and $1000 travel fair for the PDC 2005.

You can do that by either blogging your way in or code your way in using Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the Shareware Starter Kit.

Now I’m in a bit of a dilema.

a) I doubt that my current employer will pay for this.

b) If I’ll go privately it will cost a lot of money and I will have to use my vacation days (which essentially can also be translated into money) which I want to utilize to better things like go to Thailand ;-).

c) I can try and blog myself in, but I doubt I will be able to compete with anyone.

d) I can write something up with the Shareware starter kit.

I guess option “D” is the most viable one for me but now I need a good idea, plus I need this to be a shareware (even though I don’t actually want to do this to get money).

I can understand that the reason behind this competition is to get some more software written in Visual Studio 2005 and to promote the Shareware Starter Kit idea (plus its supporting 3rd party hosts).

Maybe they should change it into a DonateWare (of the good kind) competition.

All entries MUST have their payments donated to some organization that can receive donations using PayPal or something like that.

Of well… If you have any interesting ideas, be sure to Email them to me :-)