We already have the second winner in SilverlightShow WP7 Quiz, three more winners to be selected! Read below our short talk with Day Two quiz winner Daniel May (@danielrmay) who won a 12-month MSDN subscription and a nice WP7 Tshirt!
Join us on Twitter and watch for the next questions, every day until Friday Sept 24th, at 10:00 am PDT!
Q. Daniel - congratulations for becoming the second winner in SilverlightShow WP7 Quiz! Could you introduce yourself to the community at SilverlightShow - who are you, your professional background, projects you are currently working on, interests, blog or anything else you’d like to mention?
A. Thanks! I’m Daniel May – 18, from Surrey in the UK. I’m a Silverlight & Blend specialist working for a small startup called sharpcloud – developing a social roadmapping tool built in Silverlight. I’ve been developing for about 7 years, moving to .NET from VB6, on to Silverlight in the past few years. Really interested in all things Blend and Silverlight related – including WP7! I have a blog over on my website (http://www.danielmay.co.uk/) but I’m a little lazy when it comes to posting – if you have a question or want to contact me it’s probably best to tweet me (@danielrmay).
Q. Are you interested in WP7 development? Are you currently working on a WP7 application?
A. Absolutely – I’m working on an application called “cyclehubs”, used for finding the nearest Barclays Bicycle Hire station to you when you’re in London. Development and device testing is going really well and I’m scheduled to release on WP7 launch. cyclehubs is a relatively short-and-sweet app, but I’m hoping to expand and have a few ideas. Watch this space!
Q. If you were Microsoft, what would you add in WP7?
A. From a consumer perspective, I’d add in ‘simple’ things such as copy and paste functionality. From a developer perspective, I guess we can only see what plans Microsoft have in the future – it’s going to be an interesting ride with WP7. We’ve already seen how many devs attended the web sessions Microsoft hosted, there is a large hunger for further information not only regarding what Microsoft have at the moment, but what they plan to do for the future.
Q. What do you expect from the official launch of the WP7 platform?
A. I’m not quite sure. It should be really interesting to finally see what kind of apps people have spent the last near-year or so working on. I’m especially looking forward to seeing the Marketplace in true action, it’s looking quite good thus far and hopefully it can only get better with the different apps submitted.
Q. There is a real hunger for WP7 resources right now, we judge this from the interest towards any WP7-related article we post on SilverlightShow. What WP7 topic would you be interested to read about on our pages?
A. I think you guys have done a great job with the amount of information you cover in your posts – your Stock Quoting Demo by John McFetridge seems to be coming along nicely. More demos, samples and explorative content is great and will surely rope in more developers to reading what you guys are doing. Your WP7 “series” by Anton Polimenov is essentially as worthwhile as reading a WP7 book – I hope that you continue to add more subject matter into that.
Q. What area of Silverlight are you currently exploring? Most recent challenge you were faced with in your work?
A. Well, a lot of the stuff I do at work revolves around the 3D side of our application, but also hopping over between the different aspects of visualizing information – so for a majority of the time I’m exploring multiple areas of Silverlight. There’s a lot to learn, and with WP7 there’s an extra layer!
One of the things I love being in the line of work that I’m in is that there are so many challenges. Work is challenging – and that’s what keeps it interesting for me. I guess the most recent challenge I’ve had to overcome is completely restyling our application – changing every small bit of our application to match the new designs received.
Q. You are quite young, and yet have plenty of speaking engagements. Could you tell us more on where and when people may meet you?
A. Indeed! I turned 18 last month – quite young for a professional software developer. I guess I have lots of speaking engagements because I have a passion for shared knowledge. There’s a certain level of enjoyment when you have anywhere between 20 and 100 people listening to what you have to say – I enjoy teaching and think that the more we can share and learn as developers, the more we can apply in our everyday lives. I’ve presented at 3 conferences this year, a number of user groups and I also presented my WP7 app – cyclehubs – at an event called Young Rewired State.
I have a few others planned for the rest of the year – including speaking at DDD Ireland (http://www.developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/dddie10) and DevEvening UG (http://www.devevening.co.uk/) . I also gave an interview to BBC Radio 1XTRA (UK) regarding young entrepreneurship which will be broadcast on the 1st and 2nd of November – listen out for me!
Cheers for the MSDN license guys – it’ll really contribute to my plans with cyclehubs as well as the future. Hope to see you soon – maybe come along to an event!
Thanks, Daniel, for taking part in our quiz, and for giving this interview for SilverlightShow!
We invite you to take part in all other SilverlightShow quizes and contests, and contribute to creating useful WP7 content for SilverlightShow, and the whole Silverlight community!