Yes, Christmas is almost here, but this only means that 'tis the right season for some development involving Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight. Tim Sneath, Microsoft resident group manager for client platforms, made sure to send out invitations to the contest season for WPF and Silverlight. Well, the truth of the matter is that between hanging mistletoe and trimming the Christmas tree, you are bound to find time for a tad of code. Two companies have some quite attractive offerings tucked away in Santa's bag, provided you are ready to accept their challenges: Lab49 and the International .NET Association Europe.

Lab49 "announced a WPF innovation contest with some awesome prizes including a top-notch Alienware developer workstation, two nights in New York, an Xbox 360 Elite, a signed T-shirt from the WPF team (I must get round to organizing that!), copies of Windows Vista Ultimate. The first 25 submissions will receive over $500 worth of prizes, and there's a $100 discount off Xceed's DataGrid for every single entrant. I particularly like the nature of this challenge; participants download a sample dataset from their servers and have to come up with an innovative visualization using WPF," Sneath revealed.

As far as the Lab49 competition for building WPF applications is concerned, the dealdines are as follows: February,14 (early acceptance) and February, 29 (final submission). INETA Europe, on the other hand, is offering no less than $9,000 in prizes for the European Silverlight Challenge. "INETA Europe (the International .NET Association) have launched a Silverlight contest that will be open to entrants from many European countries including UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. Again, there are some hot prizes including three tickets to MIX08, MSDN subscriptions and a number of books and developer tools," Sneath added.