My Artist Explorer Wins at the Circus Mashimus Mashup Contest!

I just heard that my entry into the Circus Mashimus contest was just selected as Best In Show winner.  My entry was about a week’s worth of effort (including a few long nights) using Expression Blend and Visual Studio.  In that week, I learned about the various APIs from Best Buy, New York Times, Billboard, and Intellepeer, built kits (Silverlight Libraries) for each service, came up with a concept and crafted it into a Silverlight 2 application.  As I wrote before, I will be releasing the kits soon to the MSDN Code Gallery or CodePlex – once I clean them up and complete them.  Then you can start building mash-ups with them and other kits, like the new Silverlight Kit for MySpace. 

If you’re starting to see a pattern here with what I’m doing – you wouldn’t be mistaken – I am a Synergist - I think that designer-friendly kits are a real way to get people thinking about building cool Silverlight applications that connect various services with social networks.

When you release an API people will use it in ways that you hadn’t thought of.  One of the coolest parts of this mashup is that I’m using the Silverlight Toolkit AutoCompleteBox wired to the Best Buy Products Service to do autocomplete on musical artist names.

You could also use the Best Buy Store Locator service to get approximate Latitude/Longitude locations for any zip code in the United States: See this mashup for the distribution of Best Buy Stores across America (1,052 in total but only one in Alaska – go figure).  I wrote about that mashup with the new Virtual Earth control Silverlight control (CTP) earlier.

Now it’s your turn – what can you mashup with Silverlight?