Ten Days in Redmond:
Building a Silverlight Application at the Microsoft Artists in Residence (A-i-R) Competition

– Jordan Snyder, Software Architect, EffectiveUI

In an effort to deliver the promise of next-generation technology, Microsoft invited 10 two-person teams to compete for glory at its Artists in Residence program held in February, 2008 at the Microsoft compound in Redmond, Washington. I was fortunate to be selected to participate, along with my designer partner and fellow employee at EffectiveUI, Patrick Hansen.

Basically, we had 10 days — including a weekend — to learn a new technology and build a working Silverlight application. Silverlight 2.0 was really young then (pre-public Alpha), and one of Microsoft’s goals was to use the feedback from our learning experiences to help de-bug it and improve its features and performance. At the same time, we got to interact with top-notch colleagues from all over the world and participate in a fast-paced, real-time competition.

Like me, most of the participants had no previous Silverlight experience. I faced some interesting technical challenges, the least of which being that I’d never actually used C# or .NET for anything. I was using Visual Studio 2008 and .NET for development, while Patrick used Expression Blend and Expression Design for design. He’s much more familiar with Adobe design tools, so when he moved to the Expression Suite, he was not able to work as quickly as he usually does.

The first two days were spent in training, and then we had eight days to come up with an application and build it. Patrick and I decided to build an online, collaborative musical step sequencer. We’re both passionate about music, and this seemed like an original idea that would push the limits of the technology while still being fun and interesting enough to generate some social/viral buzz. Patrick came up with a great design; his knowledge of musical gear definitely came in handy.

We worked 14-16 hours a day. The team from Sapient was in the office next to ours, and we ended up spending a lot of time with them. We bounced ideas back and forth, shared our successes and failures, and really ended up encouraging and supporting each other. It was friendly competition, but both teams knew that arch rivalry lurked under the surface our newly developed friendships.

When everything was said and done, and we had made our presentations to the other competitors and some key people at Microsoft, Sapient walked away with the award for the best application. They built a music player based on Audio Scrabbler data that was described as “Pandora done right.” The user experience was wonderful; the aesthetics and usability were simply beautiful.

We won the award for best presentation, which I suppose is second place. I believe that we did a good job selling our application, and definitely generated some buzz about it. Click here to look at our presentation, which outlines our challenges, solution and toolbox; talks about what we learned; and details our application dubbed NetStep. I’m actually hoping to tweak some things on NetStep and release it here on the UIRC so people can play with it.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t mention all the other applications from the other teams, but they were all great projects. I was incredibly inspired by and grateful for the creative energy flowing around these teams. Their technical prowess was also impressive. To know that most of them had barely even heard of Silverlight before the training, and see the end results at the end of 10 days was awe-inspiring.

There were good stories all around us. Our fellow competitors were absolute top-notch people in this industry, but they were humble (the most important quality in my mind), kind, laid back and just down to earth.

About Jordan Snyder

Before joining EffectiveUI in June 2007, Jordan built boutique Flash Web sites and applications mostly targeted to the European sports market. She is a musician, interactive artist, snowboarder, avid reader and software engineer who is interested in almost everything: design, architecture, physics, music, art, weaponry, history, religion/spirituality, health, psychology, sociology and gender studies.