This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever is a new puzzle site aimed at programmers in the same vein as web-based puzzle challenges such as notpron, Rankk and Python Challenge. Created by Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg, “TDPE” consists of a sequence of 30 web pages, each one with a puzzle that when solved will take you to the next one. Each puzzle provides the necessary hints to solve it, although some of the hints are tucked away in not-so-obvious places. Some puzzles can be solved with a little programming skill, some require a little knowledge of computer programming theory (although a little Binging will do) and some can be solved with a little logic and lateral thinking.

Jeff has offered a prize to the first fifteen people who complete the The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever (only those who complete it will know how to prove it). Judging from the Twitter account for “TDPE” and tweets with the #TDPE hashtag, not all the prizes have been claimed yet.

I managed to power through the first 29 puzzles while watching Ghostbusters on TV yesterday, but the very last one has me stumped. As others who’ve been flummoxed by this problem have said on Twitter, I’m sure I’m overthinking it.

Can you beat the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever? I’m sure you can, but you might want to do it after work. Let me know how you’re doing in the comments!

Here’s a cute little puzzler I got from the blog hackification — why the does code below compile?

using System;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            http://www.globalnerdy.com
            System.Console.WriteLine("Hello from Global Nerdy!");
            System.Console.WriteLine("(Press ENTER to continue)");
            System.Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

Here’s what the output of the program looks like:

Why does the program compile even though the first line of the Main() method is a “bareword” URL? See if you can figure it out on your own rather than running it through the compiler – doing that gives away the answer.

I’ll post the answer in the comments.