Newsletter For August 14th, 2008 - Codename "Software Summer Sizzle"

1. Newsletter Editorial

It's clear that we have to make a concerted effort to get these newsletters out every two weeks, because with a month between them there is simply too much to write about.

The first item of news to report is that we have announced the winners of the DonationCoder/Veign Programming contest.  The three main entrants were each so different and interesting in their own way that we decided it would be wrong to choose a single winner.  So, we featured all of the entrants and awarded the main prize (a MSDN Visual Studio Developer license worth over $10k) after asking the three entrants to tell us how they would use the prize if they won it. Read the announcement for all the details and to find out who won the big prize! The winning entrants have even been featured on several big sites (we love to see them getting the attention they deserve!), including Eric Wong's "Circle Dock" -- an extremely cool non-traditional dock/launcher that he continues to improve each day, and Eoin O'Callaghan's ServiceProfiles -- a very professional tool for toggling groups of services on and off.

This month has also seen an abundance of new software releases and new websites by forum members.  I released new versions of some of my programs and we saw very cool new programs from other members of the forum, including a cool utility called LineByter that I actually ended up featuring in a mini-review.  Several members of our forum are also branching out with new websites, which we love to see.  In this newsletter you'll even see a section devoted to such announcements.

If you are new to the website please don't be shy. Just find a forum thread below that piques your interest and jump right into the discussion!