UPDATE: The winner has been announced: And the winners of the Mindscape Professional Pack are...

mindscape Today it’s my 35th birthday, but instead of boring you with the usual “what happened in the last year” kind of post I’m going to give one of my readers and Twitter followers a gift.

But before the prize, I just want to do a very quick roundup of what my 34th year was: I became an MVP, I became an ASP Insider, I published my first book and I took part in my first triathlon. So quite a good year after all.

But back to the gift.

The prize

Thanks to JD Trask and Mindscape (the cool Wellington based company I was lucky to share the office with when I lived in New Zealand) today you have the chance to win one license of the Mindscape Mega Pack Professional, which is worth $599!

It contains all Mindscape’s products (LightSpeed, all the WPF controls and the SimpleDB tools) and a 12 months subscription: this means that the winner will receive all the updates and also any new products Mindscape will release in the next year, like the new WPF controls, Silverlight controls and more.

The Giveaway Rules

The giveaway starts today, Friday September 11th, 2009 and will last till Thursday September 17th, 2009 11:59PM CEST (date and time in other timezones). I’ll then announce the winner on Friday September 18th, 2009.

All you have to do to signup for the competition is to re-tweet this post (but changing with your own text) and add the #mindscape hashtag, the #giveaway hashtag and the url to this post http://bit.ly/MindscapeGiveaway in it. All the rest can be whatever you like: be creative, you have 75 characters more to fill. If you are out of creative sentences, here is a little help:

RT @simonech Sign me up for the mindscape pack giveaway #mindscape #giveaway http://bit.ly/MindscapeGiveaway

To make sure I don’t miss any tweet, also comment on this post with your twitter name and follow me on twitter (this way I can contact you in case you are picked up from the draw).

To increase the chance of winning the Mega Pack you can tweet more than once, but only once per day, and the “creative part” of the tweet must be different each time. But you need to comment to this blog post just the first time.

So, in short:

  1. Follow @simonech
  2. Re-tweet
  3. Comment leaving your twitter name
  4. and the re-tweet once a day

All the first 3 steps are required to take part in the giveaway. If you don’t comment and don’t follow, you will not be signed in for the competition as I’ll not be able to contact you in case you win.

How the random draw will work

  1. First I’ll look at the comments to this post to gather all the people that signed up for the giveaway.
  2. I’ll then collect all the tweets of all the comment authors.
  3. I’ll purge out tweets sent during the same day and with the same message.
  4. And finally I’ll pickup one of the tweets from this list.

And once picked up the winning tweet I’ll notify its author via DM.

Mindscape Mega Pack

Mindscape is a leading-edge Wellington based software solutions provider widely regarded as a think-tank within the Australasian technical community.

A company founded on the principles of technical excellence, Mindscape employs recognised industry thought-leaders; people who are passionate about producing great, high-quality software.

You can read more about the company and their products from their website and I really recommend subscribing to their blog to get the latest news about their products. You can also download the free version of LightSpeed, and try it out.