Geek.blog

So a few guys from work and myself were asked to compete in the Microsoft PhizzPop challenge this week. I had heard of the competition a few months back, but I had thought it was more of a student challenge. After being able to rearrange my work schedule for 3 days of Silverlight training, I was off to the MN Microsoft campus!

The training was taught by Aquent, which was nice to have a neutral party teaching the software. I was actually pretty impressed with the Microsoft Expression Suite. We spent most of the class working in Blend 2 building Silverlight applications. After working in Flash and other web technologies for years, I was happy to notice the similarities Microsoft incorporated into the Expression Suite to help first time users jump right in. My favorite part was the tie between Visual Studio and Blend. Using Visual Studio to edit the C# (main programming language for Silverlight applications) worked great. I never knew Visual Studio was so robust as an editor, I wish I could edit Actionscript in it!

So after 3 days of training, we received our challenge from Microsoft: Pitch an idea to help a fictitious retailer engage more customers online and offline. My team regrouped and over the next 5 days (3 of them business) worked on our pitch. During that time I was the team’s developer. It was my job to build out the technical part of the pitch using Microsoft technologies (Expression Studio mainly). One neat thing to note, everyone in the contest was able to develop for the new Microsoft Surface and Microsoft Airwave technologies. We had access to one of the few Microsoft Surface prototypes to use in our presentations. The scheduling around developing for these technologies was a little too tight, we could only debug on a live machine for a couple hours the day before the contest, so my team decided to stick to desktop development instead. I will admit switching over to a new technology in such a short time then creating an entire business pitch in three days was a pain.

My team pushed late into each night to develop the concept, art, and media files for our final presentation. Finally on Thursday evening, we headed over to Solera in downtown Minneapolis for the PhizzPop event. Microsoft did a great job with the event, lots of lights and drinks (do not try the absinthe!). Each team had 8 minutes (10 tops) to present their pitch to a panel of 5 judges from local business and agencies. My team nailed our presentation, and in the end were one of two favorites. The other was Minneapolis design agency Zeus Jones. After 15 minutes the judges regrouped and announced the winner of the event. After all that hard work and effort over the past two weeks, team space150 (my team) lost to Zeus Jones. I was bummed, but if we had to loose to any of the teams, I was glad it was them.

Overall it was a great experience that brought us together and I can walk away with some great knowledge of this new technology. Going forward I don’t plan using Silverlight all too much, it definately has limited moments of being a better option than Flash for me.