Introducing the Great Canadian Apportunity

There are lots of reasons to give Windows Phone development a try:

• The all-new UI. It’s beautiful, different, it’s useable and useful and people love it after taking it for a psin
• The great phones. I really love my Samsung Focus.
• The development tools. You’ve got Visual Studio (or Visual Studio Express for Phone, which is simply amazing for an IDE that’s being given away for free), and you’ve got not one, but two development frameworks: Silverlight for more “app”-flavoured apps and XNA for games, all built on top of the .NET framework.
• The opportunities. It’s still early in the days of Windows Phone, and it’s still early in the era of smartphones (most North American mobile customers have yet to get their first smartphone) – this is your chance to make a big splash in both the worlds of Windows Phone and smartphones in general.

Now Canadian developers have one more reason to take up Windows Phone 7 development: The Great Canadian Apportunity. It’s your chance to write an app, show it off to developers across Canada and compete for a chance to win prizes including:

• The grand prize: $CDN10,000 in sweet “cash money”
• Travel and registration to Canada’s web and social media conference, the Mesh conference
• A Dell Alienware laptop
• Xboxes and Kinect
• and more!

I’ll be writing regularly about The Great Canadian Apportunity and Windows Phone development over the next few months, but if you want to get started right now, take a look at the site for The Great Canadian Apportunity to get all the details. Time’s a-wasting: get started writing the Great Canadian App!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.