This post is a bunch of things, wrapped up in one.  First and foremost, it’s my Official entry into the “Blog’n to PDC” contest.  Secondly, it’s way for you to create your own entry into this contest, with very little effort and HTML-Smithing. Third, it’s a shameless plug for WSMQ, my pet project.  Forth, it’s a demonstration of WSE, Amazon’s Web Services, and Google’s Web Services. And finally, it’s a contest (and I’ve always wanted to do one of those!)

How can one blog post be all these things?

Well, when I started brainstorming my entry to the PDC contest, I sat there thinking what a pain it was and how boring my post would be.  In fact, for a moment I thought about not entering.  "I wish I could just connect to a service, tell it a bit about me, and it would do all the work for me,”  I thought “but who would waste an entire evening writing such a service?”  Just as I was thinking this, I realized that I’m just lazy enough to write a bunch of code to avoid doing any real work.  In a few hours, I had thrown together a web service that, given a little bit about you, will automatically create a custom blog post suitable for entering you into this PDC contest. 

 No, really, I’m serious. Stop laughing. I’ve even hosted it, so all you have to do is bang some code against said web service, and voila! Your very own PDC entry. Here’s the endpoint URL:

http://www.wsmq.com/PDCService/PDCContestEntryService.asmx

This service does the following things:

• Does a google search for links linking to your blog, and adds them to your entry post, so they know you're serious.
• Looks up your interests at Amazon, and returns a list of books that match your interest, and adds them to your entry post.
• Finally, registers your entry in a WSMQ Hosted public queue, and gets a list of other coders who have done the same, and adds this list to your entry post.  * I had to fit in my queue service somehow

You can even download the solution code here, including an NUnit unit test project (which you can actually use as a client to talk to the service.)

As an added bonus, I’ll randomly select one of the bloggers who use my service, and send them a copy of  COM Programming with Microsoft .NET by John Paul Mueller, Julian Templeman

Have fun, and good luck to everyone who enters!

-Brendan

Oh, an here’s my auto-generated post entry:

I’m Blog’n my way to the PDC!

If you haven’t heard, Channel9 has started a contest where you can win a ticket to the PDC, including an airline ticket and hotel!  This is one amazing contest, and all you have to do to enter is have a blog, and post why you should win the prize.  So here’s my official entry:

Here's some information to help you get to know me better:

Why me?

Why do I want to go to the PDC? Because I love to blog! And I'm prolific! Here's some of my more popular blog posts links according to Google :