Microsoft Office 2010 Key blog three-windows-phone

It’s awards season in the worlds of cinema and music, but what about in the world of geeks? Not to be outdone by Oscar and Grammy—and always stalking the latest celebrities around Microsoft, the JobsBlog crew tracked down three real award winners … the champs of Windows Phone’s employee-only application building content. We asked about the inspiration behind their winning masterpieces.

The trophy: Best app And the award goes to: Nikolai Faaland, Sr. Software Engineer, Bing Mobile The app: Draw!, which includes a rich feature set that allows for finger drawing, special effects, and loading images from the phone or the camera The inspiration: “I don’t typically write a lot of code on my own time.There’s a lot more to my life than code and work, so when I do it, there’s usually some specific thing in my own life that I want to accomplish. Draw! started as an app for the Zune HD, because at the time the Zune didn’t have a drawing app and I wanted one just to entertain my kids. When Windows Phone 7 came out and I saw that I could use C# and Silverlight, I thought ‘that’ll be fun’ and so started working on it.

It’s still really for my kids. They’re the ones that asked for all the features and found all the bugs, and my big ‘yeah that was worth it’ moment came from my daughter taking the final version and playing quietly on the couch with it for an hour, running up to me now and again and happily showing me what she had done. That’s my inspiration.” The trophy: Best game And the award goes to: Steve Otteson, Sr. Software Development Engineer, Windows Phone The app: Sabotage, an action arcade game in which the player controls a turret to keep away paratroopers, bombs, and cruise missiles The inspiration: “Writing video games is something I’ve always been interested in, but mostly as a hobby. I wrote a couple games for Windows CE 1.0/2.0 in the late 1990’s,Office Enterprise 2007, including a version of Sabotage.

When I heard about the developer contest, I knew it was a perfect opportunity to write a new game. I thought it was great Microsoft was allowing me to enter a game in the contest, and yet still keep the game as my own and as something I could sell on the Windows Phone Marketplace. Since Windows Phone is so much more powerful than what I could do on Windows CE in the 90’s, I knew I could soup it up with 3D graphics, background music, new enemies, weapons, and power-ups. Fortunately,Windows 7 64 Bit, there are tons of online resources to help those who want to write games using XNA on Windows Phone, so I never felt overwhelmed when I came across something I didn’t know how to do. And, as an added bonus, the same code can be used on the PC and on Xbox. Cool,Windows 7 Ultimate!”

The trophy: Best user experience And the award goes to: Kevin Tarchenski, Software Development Engineer,Microsoft Office 2010 Key, Xbox The app: BuildDown, a puzzle game The inspiration: “I’ve been developing my own games—or more accurately,Office Enterprise 2007, tinkering with gameplay concepts—since high school. Playing games is my pastime, but making them is my passion. I enjoy working under pressure, and the submission deadline was the perfect motivation to finish my game and actually put it out there. Also, the contest was a fun incentive to create something new for a platform I’m really excited about: I think Windows Phone 7 has a ton of potential as a game platform, and I’m already hard at work on my next mobile game.”

Learn more about building apps for Windows Phone 7 See the top-rated Windows Phone 7 apps. -->