On June 10, we announced the finalists of Code Your Art Out, a “wicked” coding competition, as described on the competition’s home page. Last night, the Code Your Art Out Finale was held at the BizMedia Rooftop in downtown Toronto and was packed with developers, designers, people who are passionate about non-profits, other Code Your Art Out contestants, the finalists, and their close friends and family.

To kick off the finale, some of the Code Your Art Out contestants had the opportunity to present their submissions. Even though they didn’t make it to the finale, their apps were fantastic, exemplifying the openness and interoperability of the Microsoft stack.

Here’s a recap of the apps:

	Booom!! Karim Awad, Trevor Dean (of bigtime design) Booom!! is the only system which allows you to receive the information you want from your favourite brands and pages on Facebook. No more piles of messages in the "Other" box or constant posts to your wall. Booom!! only sends the stuff you want and drops it right into your personal Booom Box. Booom!! provides a simplified messaging system for both page admins and Facebook users. Technologies Used: .NET 3.5, PHP, SQL Server 2008, Windows Azure, Facebook API, jQuery
	Care Kowasheek Mahmood (of Fersh Co.) Care is a secure portal for patients to log in and create reports of symptoms and side effects of their conditions so that they can actively take part in the medical process. Care allows health-care professionals to see data from their respective patients as symptoms are logged. For patients, Care allows them to find information on how to manage their symptoms based on input of professionals. Care is built with extendibility and modularity in mind so that it can be deployed for many other organizations, hopefully benefitting many patients by helping them stay connected with their health-care professionals. Technologies Used: .NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 3, Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, jQuery, Ninject, BlueprintCSS CSS Framework, iTextSharp.
	ProfessorPedia Tony Yang and Team ProfessorPedia is both a social and an informational platform for students’ daily academic lives. It captures several main features of students basic academic needs: Professor rating, book trading, student forum, and WikiNote. On the professor rating system, users can have access to professors’ basic information and students’ comments on his/her courses easily by searching for the professor’s name or the course name. ProfessorPedia’s book trading system is designed for both first and second hand textbook trade and exchange between post-secondary students. The student forum is what the name suggests - a place to relax, spread, and gather feeling and warmth. Students can chat and discuss course materials in the forum as well as through the integrated online chatting system. Technologies Used: Windows Azure, PHP, jQuery, Data Mining, CakePHP
	Epilogger (Semi-Finalists) Michael Nussbacher, Chris Brooker, Rebecca C-Palacios Epilogger is epilogue + blogger and is all about immortalizing all the hottest happenings in your city. It creates a permanent time capsule of the event for you and your friends to enjoy for years to come. It’ll even arrange all your memories into a sweet scrapbook with analytics and content from everyone who took part whether they were at the event in person or in spirit! Technologies Used: .NET 4.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 RS, Windows Azure, ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS7, Windows Server 2008 R2, jQuery, Twitter API, Foursquare API, Facebook API, TwitPic, YFrog, and Plixi.

And the winner of Code Your Art Out and the recipient of $10,000 is…

Save the Rain Mark Laudon The Save the Rain Water Productivity Calculator utilizes open data sources to actually make a difference in the world. This creative app strives to deliver a tool for developing worlds and areas suffering from water shortage. This original app also provides an avenue to raise awareness of how high a value rain water can have in the production of crops/hunger resolution. The application is easy to use, and, requires no training. The app determines how much rain you receive in a year and calculates your rainfall savings potential. Technologies Used: Windows Azure, Google Maps, ESRI's ArcGIS API for JavaScript, Hosted ArcGIS Server Web Mapping Service

Congratulations to Epilogger, second place winners of Code Your Art out and the recipients of $5,000.

The competition was tough and each of the participants put in their all to achieve excellence in the three judging criteria (Interoperability, Creativity, Usage), creating applications that are truly unique and have real world uses. Congratulations to all!

Stay tuned as we talk to each of the contestants about their applications and the technologies they used.

This post also appears in the Canadian Developer Connection