Microsoft is at it again. Every time I turn around the are finding new ways to engage the PHP community. Now they’ve gone and started another programming contest – this one involving their Cloud platform Azure. Click on in, I’ll give you what details I’ve got so you can get to coding.

Less than 2 weeks remain to nominate your favorite open source project in Packt’s 2010 Open Source Awards.

We are actively recruiting participants to take place in a developer event (“Dev Derby”) that pits one language against others. It is a day-long programming challenge where teams of developers work to create an application serving a real-world need. Five teams will represent different programming languages—PHP, C#, Ruby, ColdFusion, and Java—to produce a demo application that will be released as open source software.

Early April, Cal Evans approached me with the request to judge the winPHP contest, from a community point of view. After some questions on what the role of a judge implied, I agreed with the contest. During the time the contest ran, I followed the blog posts and tweets about the winPHP contest, and was getting excited to review all those great applications. I figured the judges would be busy as hell in the time between the end of the contest and the announcement of the winners. Seeing all those great contributions, I was actually starting to fear my days of DPC would be filled with application reviewing. It did not exactly turn out that way…

As previously announced, Zend held a contest here to give away 5 free tickets to ZendCon 2009 to 5 deserving User Groups. It’s now time for the announcements of who won!

Zend and S&S support local PHP user groups, and will be providing a limited
number of free ZendCon passes for user groups to distribute to active members
who might not have the financial wherewithal otherwise.

Microsoft, Ibuildings, and Leaseweb have joined forces to create a contest, and are offering some big prizes for it. To participate, you need to develop an application on Windows/IIS7 using PHP and submit it to the contest. The winners will then be announced at the closing keynote of the Dutch PHP Conference 2009. Only catch is that it is open to programmers in Europe/UK only.

p. For the month of July, phpwomen.org is holding an article contest! They are accepting articles posted in their Best Practices forum for judging. Their prize lists includes…well, why tell you here, click on inside and I’ll give you the whole scoop.

p. There are a lot of good programming contests out there for PHP programmers to enter and win. Most of them require you to write a piece of code or solve a problem. There’s nothing wrong with that but programmers are busy people. So I’ve come up with a contest for busy programmers. Give blog about PHP Abstract and you could win a free book. Not just any book though, these are programming books. (you know the ones, when you go to check out at your favorite book store they charge you by the pound.)

Ok, we just finished one contest, let’s kick off another one. For all those that register or have registered for a full conference pass before September 12th, one person will win three free nights at the Hyatt Burlingame.