December 6, 2006

The Coolest XML Project Contest

I completely forgot that I still have one Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription gift card to give away. And it expires 12/31! Oh boy, what do I do now??? So for the next 2 weeks I'll be holding the "The Coolest XML Project Contest".

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Here is the deal. If you are working on a cool project, product, web site, service or whatever no matter open source or commercial one, which uses any XML technology in any way (hey, isn't anything matches this description nowadays?) you have a chance to win this $10K worth gray box from Microsoft called "Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription for one year". Everybody is eligible, no limitations or restrictions (well, microsofties and devs working for Al-Qaeda are obviously out).

To enter the contest you only need to describe your thing (project/product/web site/service/whatever) to me. Keep it simple. Don't forget to mention how any XML technology is involved. Just post it as a comment on this page. Or if you need pictures to describe it - write on your blog and post here a link. If your are not ready to disclose your stuff to the public eye, send me an email (and then if you win I promise not to unveil project details until you say me so).

It's me who will decide which entry is the coolest and so who is the winner. I'll probably consult my friends though.

Well, I'm XML and XSLT geek doing open source projects so I'm naturally biased toward such kind of things, but that means nothing. What I really want is to give it away to somebody who actually needs it and who is it going to use it to build something cool and preferably to benefit the community.

I'm accepting entries till December 24, 2006. Hurry up. Take a chance.

For a small site doing web page design might be best done without a full-time web designer and simply learning how to do web site design on your own, working on your web site design from scratch or from a template.

Java 6 gets pull XML API

Better late than never - forthcoming Java 6 (currently Release Candidate) will include StAX, pull based streaming XML API.  .NET has pull based XML parser (XmlReader) from the very beginning and Microsoft was arguing .NET's XmlReader is better than SAX since at least 2002. No, I'm not saying Java catches .NET up with one more feature, no. I'm just glad I wil be able to parse XML using the same model and very similar API on both platforms.

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