Contribute to open source, get a shot at a free book
David Ward has an interesting contest Having three copies of Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls to give away, he’s created a project on CodePlex, and is offering the books to people to who contribute the most to it. One can contribute code or documentation or anything – one book is raffled off among those who merely participate in the online discussions about it (or post a blog entry about it). Since these days I’m into Monorail and jQuery rather than asp.net, I can’t contribute much in the way of code, but I am very active in the discussion group. In fact, if you discount the coordinator (Encosia aka David Ward) and JRumerman (who is one of the authors of the book being given away), I think I’m the most active guy there).
Oh, I guess I should mention the purpose of the project: it’s to develop an ASP.Net AJAX web control to accept a potential username and handle automatically checking if that name is already being used by someone else.
Now, to contribute, you probably need to know a fair amount about ASP.NET AJAX control — which means you may not need to book you could win, but it’s a fun idea anyway….