How to Get a Free License of Red Gate's Reflector Version 7

This announcement has caused quite a stir in the developer community. You can read some constructive and not so constructive feedback in the Reflector 7 Feedback forum at Red Gate's web site.

Shortly after the announcement, Jay Grieves offered to give away 10 licenses for Reflector 7 in his post Think .NET Reflector Is No Longer Free? You Might Be Wrong... Red Gate followed up on that by providing 100 more licenses to Jay for his give-away.

I decided to follow Jay's example and have 10 licenses to give away for free as well (or almost free; see below). Red Gate was kind enough to offer an additional 5 licenses for each license I am giving away, bringing the total to 60 number of licenses.

Unlike Jay, who's either Santa Claus or a philanthropist, I am not giving away these license for free entirely. Instead, I want something in return, but not something tangible. What I would like in return for a free license to Red Gate's Reflector is an idea for an article for my web site. To qualify for a free license, send me an idea for an article through the Contact page of my web site that matches the following criteria:

• Should be clear and focused, targeting a specific technology or concept. E.g. an idea as "can you write something about BDD" does not qualify, but something like "Can you show me how to make the Microsoft Access providers for membership work with ASP.NET 4" does.
• Should be on-topic. Check out the categories of the Articles section of my web site to see the areas I typically write about. For example, don't ask me to write about using NoSQL in a PHP environment.
• Should take anywhere between 2 and 15 pages to write. E.g., don't ask me to write about my plans to bring world piece ;-)
• Should be submitted through my Contact page along with your name and e-mail address (which I'll use to get in touch with you for license details or for further information about the idea)
• Should be submitted before March 7, 2011

Ideas that match the criteria above automatically qualify for a free license until I run out of licenses. If your idea doesn't qualify: bad luck. You can always try submitting another idea. I'll be the judge, and the only judge and no correspondence will be entered into if you don't agree ;-)

I'll collect all proper ideas and put them on my "stuff to write about" list. I'll then try to cover them in the coming months, depending on the topics and the time it takes to write the articles.

So, send in your ideas now. Not only do you get a free copy of Reflector if you qualify, you also get to read an article on a topic you want to learn more about!

Disclaimer: submitting a qualifying idea does not automatically mean I write about it. You do get the free license when you qualify, but only if I find enough time to write do you get the article as well.