As I said last week, Daniela and I were developing a small application to take part in the Italian and INETA EU Silverlight competition.

This morning I tried to upload the ugly proof of concept we came out with, but it was not possible to upload projects any more (probably I misunderstood and the final date was Jan 28th in the morning, and not at midnight). Too bad since I checked yesterday and there was no other application submitted to the contest (actually one, but without the application).

But, this post is not about me not being able to take part into the competition - which is not a big issue since the application is still ugly at the moment and not competitive - : the real problem is that NO application were submitted to the Italian Competition (and looking at the sites of other countries I counted at most 10 applications submitted in the whole European competition). What does this mean?

I don't think it means there is lack of interest in the technology itself, probably just the wrong time for this kind of competition:

• it's still in alpha CTP version, and in a bit more than one month there will be a new beta version that will have a lot a changes and will include a lot of enhancements: probably lot of people thought it was a useless loss of time trying to fight with all the problems of a CTP when in 2 months they will be able to do the same things (like using a real textbox) without tons of work-arounds.
• the competition has been announced at the end of November and the final submission date was the end of January: less than 2 months, during an usually hectic period of the year (with the Christmas in the middle). Probably not many people had time to experiment with it and come out with a decent application in that little time. (To prove this point, the Spanish competition, that started in August, is the one with the highest number of submissions)
• a Silverlight application must be well crafted but also must look good: not many developers are good at drawing nice UIs, and the designer world is not interested in this new UI technology yet. Was there any point in submitting the best application with the best algorithm ever but that looked as ugly as death?

I hope there will be another competition once the Silverlight 2.0 will be released after the MIX.

Anyway, regardless of any competition, we will release the Silverlight control we are developing as soon as it's ready for public usage.