Are you a Java or a .NET/Mono/Portable.NET developer? Then you might be interested in this competition that could help you win a prize that’s worth over $3000 US.
Regarding the Competition
Basically, all you need to do is write a development/tutorial article that is more or less in accordance with our article guidelines and email it to us. It can be any kind of development article (including tutorials) for any programming language. The reason we ask for development articles in particular is because this prize will mostly benefit developers (and teams of developers as it is multi-user and it comes with a 25-seat license and full support for it).
Some additional notes:
You have a bit less than a week to finish up your article and send it over to us in order to be elligible for the prize. Last day of accepting entries will be the 11:45 PM of 11th of April 2004 (Pacific time). Of course, you can always submit your article for publication on a later date if you are not interested in the competition.
We will receive the article submissions and our team of editors will pick the most interesting/well-written/original one. The winner will be announced at the beginning of next week. The prize is electronically shipped.
About the prize: Swatter 2004 r1 Enterprise Edition
The prize is Aspire Swatter 2004 release 1 Enterprise Edition with one server included. Aspire will offer up to 25 client licenses to access the server. The total package is worth over $3000 US!
Aspire is serious about providing superior software quality management for enterprise software development projects. In early 2004 we released a brand new industrial strength software defect tracking system to push quality assurance to the next level of effectiveness.
Swatter 2004 r1 Enterprise Edition handles a wide variety of development scenarios from small to large development projects. Swatter provides a number of powerful features such as collaborative real-time data and reports, powerful searching, automated team notifications, incident report interactions tracking, and statistical analyzation of your data to quickly understand many aspects of your quality operation. Swatter allows users to collaborate across your local network or provides secured distribution for
geographically dispersed teams working over the Internet.
Please visit Aspire to download a trial and learn more about Aspire Swatter 2004 Enterprise Edition.
Disclaimer OSNews just hosts the competition, it is not responsible for the product won.
This is a great idea. I love the site and this should bring in some more great content. Keep up the good work!
Wow. I’d be really interested in that, but I don’t have the time to write one that quickly.
I just updated the article, I give you two more days, so developers who have more free time on the weekend could do so by then. So, last day for the competition entry will be the night of Sunday 11th April.
I think I’ll write an article on how to make a website cross browser compatible, then Aspire could read it and fix their site.
I think I’ll write a Portable.net article .. but what’ll I do with the prize ?
Should I write about developing portable.net , developing with it ? .. Vote ?
Well, you should start with introduction, history, comparsion with other things and stuff like that, not just jump into the middle of development. IMO It would be really interesting article.
Just some ideas.
The bad part though is that it is a Windows only product. I’d be more than willing to write an article…. I think I would rather have the cash that the product costs, though, instead of the product. I was about ready to write an article on ASP.NET with Mono until I checked the system requirements for Swatter. Too bad… Maybe the next competition will be for something more of interest to Linux/Non-Windows developers.
Unfortunatly, Linux still costs significantly more to develop on than windows. Swatter is a very advanced turnkey defect tracking system. It is all you need to track your bugs, to do lists, and then quickly analyze your team performance. As well, it is very scalable. To do this kind of development on Linux is about 5x as high cost wise. This is based on our real development estimstaes after writing code for both platforms and seeing what is on the market for code re use.
The mono fellows have a great idea yet a long way to go before products like Swatter will be available for Linux.
Well, I didn’t say that Linux was more development friendly, or cheaper to develop on. I was just commenting on the fact that it would be nice to have a competition for something that would be of more benefit to Linux/Non-Windows development.
As for Mono, It is coming along very nicely, and will be very good for development before too long. Keep a close watch on it.
I really do not mean to sound like a troll Mister Edwards, but could you please publish proof for your assertations? We also develop for Windows and UNIX based systems and usually the BugTracking/TimeManagement/RequestTracking is a _lot_ cheaper for the unix based application development. While most tools for Windows based development are pretty, point and click and all humky doorey they do limit too strictly for special cases and those work arounds really cost money then. I would be more than happy to read over your findings. Until then your statement sounds more like a bad marketing attempt, sorry.
Your statement is a complete joke to anybody who has developed on both platforms.
“Linux still costs significantly more to develop on than windows”
First I think it’s great your company is willing to give something like this for a prize. That alone says a lot if you ask me no matter what OS it runs on.
Your statment about linux costing significantly more to develop on than windows. That I’m wondering about. Maybe in you personal experience that is true, but as a blanket statement I can’t say I would think that to be true. Considering your tool only runs on Windows I assume your shop is a micrsoft only development shop, which means the developers are probably locked into the microsoft way or the highway. So that statement really has more holes in it then swiss cheese. Maybe your developers are not proficient on using Linux tools. This is not a fault of devlepment on Linux but the people who can’t use it.
How much would it cost to create a database app in VS .NET and then port that same app to Linux, Mac, and Unix? I’m not sure how much, but you would be doing atleast 2 – 3 rewrites to get that same application natively running on those platforms. If you use a tool like QT you can program on any platform and recompile on any other with little to no code change.
So if I use QT on Linux with Kdevelop my cost is pretty low compared to your project only written in .NET and then being ported to the others. Or if I write my app with QT on Windows with VS .NET I can compile on Linux. Either way you pay a license fee for QT on both platforms. VS .NET is a nice tool, but to be honest for Kdevelop being free I would go with Kdevelop and QT any day of the week over VS .NET or what ever else Microsoft wants to call it. In a microsoft only world VS .NET is nice tool with a fairly low cost $1000+. But then you can’t create applications for other platforms and cross platform will continue to be more of an issue as time goes on.
I think depending on the project Linux can be just as cheap if not cheaper as Windows.
I can totally backup that Windows is far cheaper to develop on than Linux. Although I own Aspire, I also still code a lot. In my career I worked with Solaris and Linux. After all is said and done, you can do way more, way fater, and product a much cleaner, and feature rich application dollar for dollar on windows. .NET is 4x faster to develop in than any other development tool on the market today. I know this from working on C++ compilers early in my career then moving to .NET. Mono is currently Linuxes only hope and they are WAY behind currently. Money speaks louder than anything because everyone wants the lowest cost for their IT solutions. If Linux was it, people would move to it in drives and Microsoft would be out of business. But currently Microsoft is the best value. Swatter itself would have cost 5x more to build if it had been done on Linux. Their is no way. So for now, feature rich, powerful applications like Swatter will continue to be released on windows vs Linux. Don’t get me wrong, I like Linux a lot, but when you get right down the pocket book, it makes no sense currently.
For markets that are traditional bastions of Unix, such as the POS retail market, this isn’t entirely true. If there isn’t a need for a pretty GUI (as someone mentioned above) Windows tends to be very kludgy. Having to hack Windows adds in more cost than straightforward programming on Linux.
So, while it might be true for product A, that doesn’t mean that it’s more expensive to program all products on Linux for all markets.
It looks like someone wired up a .net tree, a .net grid, and hooked it to a database and is selling it for a lot of money.
with .net’s amazing developer productivity, it would be better to spend the time recreating aspire’s swatter app than trying to compete to win it as a prize.
developing it yourself gives you 100% chance of winning.
Well, after taking a quick look I am letting you know about the project management tool I use.
It’s called Team Elements and it has features that the rest of the enterprise can use too.
http://www.teamelements.com