If you've been wanting to attend this year's Dutch PHP Conference (June 10th through 12th) but don't think you could come up with the price for the tickets, you're in luck! Lorna Mitchell has posted about a new contest they're running to give away one ticket to the event allowing the winner access to the main conference days.

We've been busy putting everything in place for the event and our schedule is now available over at http://phpconference.nl/schedule. So now you've seen the schedule, you probably want to join us! [...] We have a ticket to give away which will grant access to the main conference days at the Dutch PHP Conference!

To put your name in for a chance to win the free pass, simply comment on this post on the Ibuildings techPortal with a valid email address attached and you'll be entered. The contest ends March 16th, so be sure to make your comment before then!

In a new post to the Ibuildings blog today Ivo Jansch has taken a look at the productivity that PHP allows developers (from a development perspective) and a case that he's come across that proves his point.

At the [Sogeti's Engineering World conference] there was a coding contest. Contestants could team up and had to write an application that found the shortest route through an arbitrary maze. [...] It wasn't until the second to last session during the conference that Juliette, Erik, Ian and Felix decided to not go see a talk but to attempt the contest.

The solution was presented to a largely non-PHP audience and benchmarked against some of the other entries created with other languages. The results were pretty amazing - while the PHP version didn't work through the problem the fastest, it did have a much shorter development time and lines of code.

As Marco Tabini points out in a recent entry to his blog, the php|architect folks are running a new "PhP on Windows" contest where you could win some pretty awesome stuff:

The contest rules are fairly simple (despite all the legal gobbledygook): write the best PHP-on-Windows application (as judged by our panel of experts and the php|a readers) and you will be the winner of a killer grand prize made up of a 52'³ LCD HDTV set, a 5.1 surround system and an XBOX Ultimate, plus your very own, all-expenses-paid ticket to TEKX.

They already have a few signed up for the contest and more are always welcome. The first sixty people to sign up for the competition also get a free Windows VPS to do their work on. There's still quite a bit of time on the clock for you to submit your entries (around 100 days at the time of this post) so, if you're interested at all, sign up

If you've been wanting to get an iPhone but have been holding off, you might want to check out the new contest NETTUTS.com is holding - first prize is a shiny new iPhone 3G S!

As many of you know, we recently launched two new categories on ThemeForest which feature PHP and JavaScript components. To help boost our selection, we thought that it might be fun to hold a small competition on Nettuts+. How's it work? In a sentence: the authors of the three best submissions to these categories, between now and August 14, will receive prizes and exposure, courtesy of CSSRockstars.com.

To submit your script(s) head over to the entry form and point them to your (already approved) upload to the site. Other prizes include an external Western Digital hard drive and a copy of CSSEdit.

On the Zend Developer Zoen today Eli White has announced the winners of the free passes for this year's Zend/PHP Conference - five groups all across the PHP community.

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! [...] To the end, the following groups are being chosen to each receive a free ticket, and they will get an email from me to start processing that soon.

The five groups that will be receiving their free pass are:

• Austin PHP Meetup
• Chicago PHP User Group
• Burlington, VT PHP Users Group
• PHPBenelux
• PHPWomen

Congrats to the winning groups! For all others, you can still get in on the early bird rates as long as you order before August 28th (plus there's all sorts of other discounts). Check out the registration page for more information.

As is mentioned on the ServerGrove blog (here) the Symfony project is holding a contest to get help from the community and offer monthly prizes.

Pascal Borreli came up with a great idea to involve the symfony developer community and advance the development of the framework. The event is called one-day-one-ticket and it will give monthly prizes to the developer that fixes the most bugs in symfony. While it is still a good idea to contribute to the community anyway and get your merit badges, a little extra incentive always helps.

This post on the Symfony blog gets more into the details of the contest. To enter you have to sign up and close one ticket a day for the month. You'll then be entered to win one of that month's prizes including copies of books, a "surprise gift" or a contribution from ServerGrove.

If you're planning on attending the CodeWorks conference in your area (or where ever the closest stop might be), you might want to check out this extra incentive to register for your pass early - the possibility that your ticket could be free!

We're so excited that the schedule for CodeWorks 09 is finally online that we have decided to come up with a great promotion: if you sign up for CW09 before July 6th, your ticket could be free-or you could win a "Master Subscription" to all of php|architect's books and magazines! Read on for more info.

If you register before July 6th (just five days away!) you'll be entered into the contest to win one of several prizes, the top being a full refund on your ticket and a free pass to your CodeWorks city of choice. Other prizes include a "master" subscription to php|architect magazine and "master access" to all of their books.

Of course, there's some rules that go along with the giveaway, so be sure to look them over before you enter.

The Zend Developer Zone (and S&S) have announced a contest giving away five tickets to this year's ZendCon conference. How can you enter? Read on...

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.

There'll be five passes handed out to user groups - one to each of the five selected groups. To enteryour user group, get one of the organizers to submit a bit of information about the group and reasons why they think the group should be given a pass. Full details on what needs to be sent and where to set it all off to can be found in the full post. Good luck!

Microsoft (as a part of MSN) has announced a new competition for developers to use their Live Search API to create applications/mashups to help either help people cope with the current state of the economy or help to protect the environment - Will Code for Green.

The goal of "Will Code for Green" is to create a Web application or mashup that uses the Live Search API in order to a) help people cope with the economy OR b) help people protect the environment. The top prizes for economy or ecology categories are $10,000 each, with 3 overall runners up receiving $3,000. The prize money for this contest is larger in hopes of promoting the formation of teams.

More information about the contest and how to enter can be found on its website - submissions will be taken from June 1st through August 12th. Voting starts immediately after and the top five will be posted by August 20th. This blog also has more information.

For the Canadians that wanted to get in on the WinPHP Challenge but couldn't because, well, where you live, there's good news (as pointed out by Stuart Herbert) - Mircosoft has announced the Ultimate Coder Battle event.

The premise is quite interesting: one student and one professional developer will be the chosen finalists, and they will battle head to head at the "Make Web Not War" conference. The winner walks away with substantial cash prizes - $5000 with another $5000 in bonus awards available. Entries close 3rd June.

Unlike in the WinPHP Challenge, you can use both a new application or a port of an older application as your entry. One application will be chosen for each of the two categories (Professional and Student) and prizes will be awarded to them along with the runners-up. Extra bonuses will be given out for developers that use .NET/PHP together the best as well as other various prizes.

You can get more information about the event from the main site or just head over and register right away. Remember, the deadline is June 3rd so hurry!