Last month we celebrated Developer Appreciation Month, and with that we started the “Build a WinSource App” contest. We were very pleased with the turnout, and choosing a winner was not an easy task! We want to thank each and every developer who took the time to submit an app to us. Without further ado, we are very happy to announce our winner!

1st Place: Christian Prescott ($4,000)

Christian is a software engineer and computer science student at Clemson University. He works in bioinformatics and, recently, Windows Phone game and app development.

On the contest:

“A news reader like this one is an exciting project – you are handed the raw content and left to style it as you please. It’s an opportunity to create a completely new user experience around an existing ethos, and what better platform to do it on than Windows Phone. I spent about two weeks of my spare time creating the bulk of the app thanks to the ease with which you can lay out pages and designs, and then another week polishing the experience and trimming fat. It’s incredibly satisfying to complete a project that feels clean and intelligent every time you open it.”

Features of the official WinSource app:

We chose Christian’s app for a variety of reasons, but what stood out the most was the full feature set. Some of our favorite features include being able to view comments, the live tile shows how many new articles have been posted, individual articles can be pinned to the Start screen, and videos can be viewed in the app. We also really liked the native design of the app. When you’re using the WinSource app it will feel very natural, almost as if you’re in the WinSource “Hub” rather than a separate app.

Here’s a list of some of the many features found in the WinSource app: