Chinese Programming Contest, or What was that I had for dinner?

Three things were memorable about the Welcome Party at CSDN-Dr. Dobb's Software Development 2.0 conference in Beijing China a week or so ago.

For starters, I didn't have to pay for it, even though CSDN editor-in-chief Mike Ming had me primed with credit-card in hand.

Secondly, for the most part I have no idea of what I ate. Those were either quail eggs or eyeballs. I don't know which. But it was all good. Come to think of it, I didn't have a bad meal the whole time in China, although I admit I passed on the green salad with Thousand Island dressing for breakfast.

Thirdly, the winners of CSDN/Microsoft Visual Studio programing contest were announced at the dinner and, thanks to my front row seat, I got to meet some of them. The contest was launched on October 9th and concluded on November 27th, just in time for judging to take place between the 27th and dinner. The goal was pretty straightforward:

...to make developers know more about the new features and productivity of Visual Studio 2008...Microsoft and CSDN hold this contest to build up a stage for all of you to show your cool, creative applications and ideas.

And there were some cool, creative applications and ideas.

• The big winner was Tony Xia for his "T2Dictionary" software for learning English. The best I can tell, Tony adopted the Merriam-Webster standard US-UK word pronunciations and made MP3 recordings to facilitate vocabulary memorization and learning skills with recording on the part of the student. Clearly I could have used the English -> Chinese version, assuming one existed, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In any event, for his efforts Tony won a first prize of 10,000 RMB, which I think is about $4800 US. I'm probably wrong and I'm sure someone will straighten me out, but what do you expect from someone who doesn't know the difference between quail eggs and eyeballs.
• The next winner was Fu Changyou who built "Excelsior," a distributed system that addresses thread (process) management issues, including log management, access control, and the like. Fu won a Sony camera, compliments of CSDN and Microsoft.
• Next, Liu Jichao, Wen Peixiong, and Zhu Jim also won a Sony camera for their Agile software that implements code storage, search, browse unified management, and the like. The promise of this tool is to change programming habits so that you can code faster. I don't know which of the three got to take the camera home, but suspect they drew chopsticks to find out.
• Zhao Yuepan won a copy of Microsoft Expression for his "The Great Battle of Tractor" which is a widely played poker game. Four players participate in the game and Zhao apparently came up with some clever algorithms to handle deductive reasoning.
• Qiu Wenbin also won a copy of Expression, but for his "Silverlight Fashion Image Design," a Silverlight 1.1 based application that lets you change your hairstyle, eyebrows, shape of your mouth, clothes combination, and the like. Sounds like what I do all the time with my Second Life avatar. But Qiu's application also includes a score function which rates how pretty your avatar is. Well, you can count me out.
• Finally, Chen Jianbo won the last copy of Expression for his "Fire Hawk," an arcade-style shoot 'em up game developed by C2MATRIX. The 3D game includes different kinds of weapon systems, fighter planes, and the like. All for your "maximum enjoyment."

While you can't tell it from my descriptions, the software these folks created was cool and they deserve a round of applause. As did the chef for the dinner. Anyone who can make me go back for a second helping of quail eggs or eyeballs deserves a pat on the back.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 06:14 PM  Permalink