We are actually holding a contest in the context of Madrid .NET User Group that can take you to Las Vegas with your Gadget for Windows Vista.

The rules are easy. Build a gadget for Windows Vista Sidebar and submit it to the contest. Participation is open from 16th of February to 29th of March. And winners will be announced at Developer Days 2007 the 29th of March in Madrid, Spain. You can submit as many gadgets as you want to, but the only requisite is that you have to be living in Spain.

We have a big first prize that consists of a travel to Las Vegas to attend Mix'07 and spend 5 days there with all the guys and influencers from EMEA. There will be a special flight from Microsoft departing from London, we'll take you there and you could spend 5 days with lot of the most interesting and smart guys over the world. This prize includes flight, lodging and event expenses; and I think there's is also included an helicopter trip over the Grand Canyon :-)

The rest of the prizes are an Xbox 360, a smartphone, 30 development books in Spanish, 3 subscription to DotNetMania magazine and software licenses by JetBrains, RedGate and ComponentOne.

To give the same chances to all of you (because the winners will be decided by the site visitors; they'll vote the best gadgets) the web is published with a big banner telling about the contest, and gadget submission and gallery will open next Monday. So you have all the weekend to prepare your first gadget.

Check it out at http://gadgetizate.madriddotnet.com

You can redistribute this and the images as far as you want to. Spread the word.

I would like to thank all the people that made this possible, people that provided the money and prizes we needed to run this contest: Scott Guthrie and Ray Winninger from MIX'07; David Stennett from JetBrains; Rachel Hawley from RedGate; Catherine Geiger from ComponentOne; Susana Krahe and Juan Miguel Asensio from Anaya Multimedia; Paco Marín from DotNetMania; Chema Alonso from Informática 64; Agustín Rodriguez from ilitia technologies; and Alfonso Rodriguez and David Carmona from MSDN Spain. And of course, all the coordinators of Madrid .NET User Group for collaborating creating this: David Herraiz, Daniel de Andres and Jesús Jiménez. Thank you all, you made this possible: around 12.000 EUR in prizes!!!!!!

For those of you who are not up to this story, Microsoft and AMD decided to give away 2000 free high-end Ferrari laptops to bloggers and influencers preloaded with Windows Vista Ultimate or even Media Centers. For free. That sounds pretty nice if you are one of the chosen bloggers. But this started to make clicking sounds and roars soon after it was announced over the blogsphere.

Some people thought they deserved also one free laptop, while others didn't disclosed it was a gift from Microsoft. Some others started to talk about Microsoft buying good reviews of Vista and some readers started to blame bloggers about not being objective in their reviews because they've been "paid" by Microsoft.

Wow!! This topic is completely grinding its gears.

Microsoft has always gifted influencers and collaborators, just have a look to MVP and Regional Director programs. Lot of people was participating in the Windows Vista Beta Program, and they sponsored free Vista keys to some of the most active bug reporters. It's not a matter of buying good reviews. It's more a matter of providing a good Vista experience so you can express yourself freely about the real user experience. Of course, if I had to choose people to try Vista at it best they would be the most active Vista influencers.

So I think this doesn't seems too important... it seems more like a jealousy thing from people that didn't received one (and of course I didn't) ... I don't think anyone would change it's objectivity for this or would your ethic sway with such a gift?

Personally my ethic or objectivity never swayed when talking in Microsoft presentation or events, blogging about them, talking about bugs, productivity or any other issues... I think the main topic they are looking for while creating communities is people that are able to talk coherently about their experiences with their products, not someone you can buy with a gift.

Hi all, this is just a quick note to say that I'll be in TechEd Europe 2006 (Barcelona) during the next week. If you may have any interest in contacting me or just hang around to have some beers, just drop me a note or look for me in the Ask The Experts section.

Btw, the saturday after TechEd (11th) there'll be a The Killers concert in Bcn, I already have my ticket :)

… about Madrid's CodeCamp, off course. Well, it's already more than official. It's so official that there are no more free room through the MSDN registration page. But there are many things that nobody asked yet, or maybe yes. In relation to more available seats, i will publish the reserved places for Mad.NUG during the next days in the group's website.

It seems that my session it's going to be the first one (so it doesn't happens like last year's when i finished around 2:00 a.m.) and I am going to speak about Microsoft Robotics Studio and Lego Mindstorms NXT. Everything seems normal, but… has anybody seen that there's a sub-session called Final Robots as the last session of Sunday's track?

Well, it's pretty simple. Throughout the event we are going to hold a robotic war that it's going to be referred as Clone Wars. In order to be able to participate it is essential to take a laptop with a version of Visual Studio 2005 in order to compile the code of your robot. During my session I will provide an API to interact with a robot library I have created, and an interface that your robot must. Robots will be uploaded to an Intranet that we have prepared, and they will fight in all-against-all combat during the day. I don't know very clearly if I will provide a set of unit tests or a robot container to test your robot's code… Anyway, the development will be quite easy. The really funny thing will be the Sunday Finals.

Sunday, both finalists of the Clone Wars will fight, live in the stage, with two real robots and a really funny system to make it a bit more complex. The winner will go home with a wonderful Lego Mindstorms NXT kit (but it will be used because is the one used to create the robot for the final fight, but take I'm taking pretty care of it, really.. the second Lego kit used in the final fight is my very own one).

So if you wanna have a chance to participate in this war and win the prize, is much better if you bring something to compile your code and use a WiFi access point with you, we will only accept entries through the intranet interface.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to comment this post. I hope you like the initiative.

Yesterday I had a meeting with MSDN Spain and ilitia technologies to close details for Codecamp 2006... and it's getting really wicked this year. We've selected last years place, it was excellently located and the facilities were amazing: cottages for the assistants, conventions hall, outdoor activities, etc... This year it's going to happen during the last weekend of October (28th and 29th) and it will include:

• Amazing sessions including: Enterprise destruction, Web20tomization, Clone Wars, BlahBlahBlah, Playmates, X's and lot of hands-on labs
• Cottages for attendees (limited to 200 seats)
• Free cottages, lunch, dinner and breakfasts (please, bring your own clothes, laptops and shampoo)
• Wireless LAN to participate in different activities (we can assure a LAN but have not managed to get Internet access yet)
• Contests, Quizs and Prices (this is going to be wicked, really!)
• And much much more :)

Soooo, keep tuned if you want to get more info and a chance to get a seat (it will be in Madrid's area, near the mountain...

I'm starting to crosspost my blog to http://geeks.ms/blogs/mjimenez

It's a local spanish community with most of the national MVP, community leaders and influencers posting there. Obviously it's in spanish, so my crossposting will be translated (can I call that crossposting or double-posting?) ... Anyway, if you feel you prefer to read spanish instead of english go and visit the welcome post I posted over there.

Last week, from Monday to Wednesday I've been to Nice to attend a Microsoft event called Connect Event 2006... it was a great event and although it was a bit light in the sessions I had the chance to network with a lot of people. The event main topic was Security and it was targeted to EMEA community leaders, INETA leaders, DPE evangelists and MVP's, so I had a good opportunity to met a lot of people I only knew by mail.

The most interesting part to me was the discussion groups, where we sat down and talked about different topics. The topic I participated in was "Microsoft's role in the communities" where Damir Tomicic and Goksin Bakir (both INETA leaders for Europe and MEA) talked us about the future of INETA in our region and the upcoming TechEd Developers in Barcelona next November; everything followed by a discussion on what are the user groups needs, what they expect from Microsoft, collaboration between other regions, etc...

On the sessions side, as I said before, everything was a bit light. We had sessions covering Holistic Security, Vista and IE7 Security, Windows Communication Foundation and Ecologies in the Home Surface... with the last one being the most innovative and interesting from my point of view.

I would love to thank all the people who attended and specially all those who I networked with; I'll get in contact as soon as I organize all my tasks for this... and of course the Microsoft team that provided us such great days (Joseffine, Simone, Hans and Urs)

While diving in the site statistics I found some incoming links from the University of Sevilla DotNetClub, and I obviously went back to the referrer page to see how the linked us. There I found that those smart guys used a camcorder to record every session we had in the first Madrid CodeCamp held last November in El Escorial.

Visit the following links to get the files:

• Download Videos from http://recursos.dotnetclubs.com/sevilla/CodeCamp2005/Video
• Download Powerpoint from http://recursos.dotnetclubs.com/sevilla/CodeCamp2005

Microsoft is holding an internal event for communities (just received an invitation) called Connect Event 2006 in south France from 13th to 15th of March. It will be hosted at the Four Seasons Resort hotel in Provence.

The topics, along with a lot of social and discussion groups, will include:

• Security Seminar: Process Based, Holistic Security - Rafal Lukawiecki
• Security Sharing Session: Community Best Practices, Microsoft Security Content
• Interoperability Seminar: Web Services & Windows Communication Foundation - Clemens Vasters
• Innovation Seminar: Social Computing - Alex Taylor

The discussion groups topics will include Security, Interoperability, Developers in the Public Sector and Microsoft's Role in the Communities

It seems an interesting topic with real top and innovative speakers... I can't way to spend a couple of days there, I'm really interested in the social computing and holistic security topics; and of course, I'll love to participate in the discussion groups.

Let's see how it end up.

This afternoon we will held the February meeting of Madrid .NET User Group. I'll be there with Tomas talking about how to set up a Continuous Integration environment for .NET projects... It will start at 19.00 and end around 21.00, if you are nearby don't hesitate to pass and visit us!

We have prepared a guide of the most useful tools and how to integrate all of them in Cruise Control .NET to provide a really agile and immediate feedback environment.  The tools included: Cruise Control .NET, NAnt, NUnit, NCover, VIL, SourceBrowse, FxCop, NDepend, Simian and NDoc. Everything will be eminently practical, setting up a real environment, with all those features. So expect an afternoon full of xml configs, nant tasks and compilations.