Today I’d like to introduce the winner of our first Silverlight coding contest. At the risk of boring everyone, I’ll begin with a bit of history. The contest idea sprang from a meeting with Erik Gunvaldson in Microsoft’s Enterprise Partner Group. On our last trip to Redmond, Debbie and I met Erik in the lobby of some distant building on the outer boundaries of the Microsoft campus — somebody call a meeting about the lack of meeting rooms there! We spent about an hour thinking of creative ways to interest .NET developers in Silverlight and the InnerWorkings learning environment. Through the hum of lunchtime lobby traffic, we finally came up with the simple idea of holding a virtual Silverlight contest.

Why not get developers to engage with Silverlight in a fun and competitive environment? How about offering them some excellent prizes like an Xbox 360, Expression Studio, InnerWorkings subscriptions, or signed copies of Halo? We reckoned that Microsoft has the contacts and InnerWorkings has the developer platform with analytics to make it happen. Good idea, let’s do it! Inevitably, this enthusiasm was followed by a few weeks of planning, project management, and email flurries to relevant parties. To his credit, Erik called in his EPG managers and lined up a bevy of partners to participate in the private coding contests.

Under Michelle Follman’s watch, the first such contest started at Sogeti and involved participants across their worldwide development organization. We had almost 50 .NET developers sign up to compete for the grand prize (Xbox 360 and 1 year subscription to the InnerWorkings catalog) and the competition was intense. The contest ran from December 10th - 28th and developers had to complete two Silverlight coding challenges set by InnerWorkings. Our trusty code checking engine filtered the top contenders and when the contest closed, a very deserving winner rose to the top of the Silverlight coding pile.

And the winner is <drum roll> Randy Magruder from Sogeti’s Florida offices in Tampa. Don’t be deceived by Randy’s stoic demeanor in this photo, he’s really delighted to win the top prize (honestly)! Randy only joined Sogeti last November, so he’s already making quite an impact. We were singularly impressed by Randy’s definitive win. In fact, he logged a perfect score in our system by completing both coding challenges with a 100% score and a single judging attempt on each challenge. A few others came close with 100% scores, but nobody else could solve the coding challenges with just one attempt. Good work indeed, Randy — take a bow!

For the record, Randy is pretty impressed by what he’s seen with Silverlight so far:

“Regarding Silverlight, I am very encouraged to see Microsoft enter this space, as the work they are doing will hopefully bring a more mature toolset and development environment to rich web applications. It will also bring many experienced developers who will already be familiar with the development environment and language. This should help them to push the edges of the web application envelope much sooner than they might otherwise be able to do.”

Well said, sir…

We’ll be running a series of Silverlight coding contests with other Microsoft partners over the next few months, so stay tuned for details on future winners. And let me know if your company is interested in setting up a private coding contest on Silverlight or some other shiny new .NET technology.

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