I'd like to personally congratulate, Faisal, the winner of the Silverlight Control Builder Contest! Faisal submitted a really cool Fish Eye Grid control. A special thanks goes out to Faisal for taking the time to develop and submit a control for the Silverlight Community!
FishEyeGrid
Silverlight control for representing items in a grid that renders them with a fisheye lens effect. When the mouse is moved over the grid, the items transform (scale & translate) to a fisheye lens effect. Items under the cursor become larger while those farther away become progressively smaller.
Source Code
Online Demo
So the Silverlight Control Builder Contest is now over and after all that excitement and anticipation from the community we got, a single, solitary entry. One person took the time to build a Silverlight control and submit it to our contest. I have to admit that we were expecting a little more of a response than that. We actually received more unique vendor contributions than we did contestants. To compound the disappointment, the contest site accumulated over 2,300 unique visitors with a total of about 9,500 page views throughout the duration of the contest, so it wasn't like nobody knew about the contest.
So, I'm trying to learn from this experience and I want to know why we didn't receive any entries. If you were thinking about entering the contest, but didn't, I would be very interested to know why. I really want to know your honest opinion of what was wrong. Here are a few questions I have for the Silverlight Community:
- Was the contest object unclear?
- Were the rules too confusing?
- Did the "US-Entries Only" requirement stop you?
- Was the contest intimidating?
- Was the contest too difficult?
- Was the contest simply not interesting?
- Were the prizes not worth the effort?
- Was there not enough time?
- What would it take for you to enter the contest?
- Is everyone just simply too busy to commit to something like this?
As Dave Campbell mentioned, I do consider the contest a failure, but I'm trying to make the best of the experience. I really want to try the contest again and make right the things that were wrong in the first attempt.
I know Silverlight is new (especially version 2), but the community is growing fast and I really expected a better response from the community. I really care about the success of Silverlight and community is a big part of that.