NZ MSDN Flash 17 November 2010 published: And the winner is…
The latest edition of NZ MSDN Flash is now available!
Editorial: Mat Velloso
Welcome to MSDN Flash,
Hello again!
I’d like to start giving you the great news: We have our 4 winners for the Windows Phone 7 development competition! Yes, we’ve picked two winners for each category and today we can tell you all about it.
For the Trade Me category, the winners are: Seshi Chemudugunta, author of the Gooseberry application, and Brian Donovan-Smith, author of the Trade Me mobile. These two applications were selected for being very nice, general-purpose interfaces for Trade Me. We also had all sorts of creative and interesting Trade Me related applications, from a game (yes, a Trade Me game!) to a bar code reader for finding books. I’m going to blog about all of these and make sure they have our support to publish these to Zune Marketplace as soon as possible.
For the New Zealand category, we’ve got Event Finder NZ, from Sashank Ramkumar, and Auckland Transits, by Shane S. Anderson. The first one’s name says everything: A very nice looking NZ events finder application. The second offers a very handy way of finding the right public transport route option for your needs.
I have to say that testing these apps one by one was possibly the most fun I ever had at work! New Zealand definitely has very bright developers. Actually it was so much fun that we’ve been thinking about running a second challenge, with more time to build and more prizes. Would you be interested about it? Let me know your thoughts so we can make an informed decision.
So thanks everyone who has participated and I’ll be in touch with every single one of you about your apps.
Now, some quick information points:
· Technology Preview 6 of Internet Explorer 9 has been released, which has been getting very good feedbacks, especially around HTML5 conformance. Differently than the beta, the Technology Preview can run side by side with your IE8.
· Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch - Download the Beta 1 to test it yourself. This is an impressive tool for quickly creating professional-quality business applications in Silverlight. So if you have been considering creating a few business applications but budget has been an issue, you should definitely start looking at this.
· Microsoft /web. Try the web platform, with open source applications from the Web Application Gallery, hosting options from the Web Hosting Gallery and the Web Application Toolkits with great samples to start from.
· Mix & Mash is a competition run by the DIA. There are special categories and prizes if you build it on Azure! But you have to rush, it has already started and it closes on Tuesday 30 November.
· Lunch Bytes is a series of on-line events covering tips and tricks to help you to get most out of the latest software development tools from Microsoft. The first one will be on 23rd Nov at 2.00 pm, about “Building Quality Applications with Visual Studio”. Keep watching this space!
· Silverlight Firestarter event, December 2, 2010: This follow-up to October’s PDC is the developer event for Silverlight. It’s a global event open to all developers through online participation.
Mat Velloso
Technology Evangelist
Microsoft New Zealand
Blog
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