{"id":1763,"date":"2012-09-18T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/msr_er\/2012\/09\/18\/microsoft-interns-in-the-clouds\/"},"modified":"2016-07-20T07:32:35","modified_gmt":"2016-07-20T14:32:35","slug":"microsoft-interns-in-the-clouds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/microsoft-interns-in-the-clouds\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Interns in the Clouds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, not literally, but many of our interns did spend a lot of their own time probing the stratosphere over the last 12 weeks, building cloud-based apps for the Windows Phone (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. These interns were participants in Project Hawaii Intern XAPFest 2012, a contest for building the coolest, most useful apps for the Windows Phone. And for eight contestant teams, August 14 was judgment day. These lucky few were the finalists, vying to place among the top three finishers and take home a cash prize.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, we didn’t just throw down this challenge without providing some assistance. Our interns are sharp, but even the best and brightest need some support. So throughout the summer, we held a series of workshops and hackathons, each attended by more than 100 interns. Topics ranged from programming with Microsoft Silverlight<\/a>, to working with Project Hawaii (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> services, to optimizing Windows Phone applications. Developers from the across the company volunteered their time and knowledge to help the interns getting started.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, the big day arrived. The eight finalists presented their ingenious projects to a panel of three distinguished judges. The judges had some difficult decisions to make, given the high quality of the contesting projects, but our steely-eyed jurists were equal to the task.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the winners are…<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Pictured
Pictured from left to right: Nishant Shukla (LyncUp), Kevin Mehlhaff (Vocab Stacks), and Matt Oates (Speak)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n