Happy New Year everyone! We’re back from a refreshing holiday break and excited to kickstart 2026. The Holidays are the most wonderful time of the year – time to hold our loved ones close and reflect upon the past year, as we prepare for the next. It is also the time where most developers take a little breather from work hustle – to celebrate, rest, learn and cater to fun little side projects.

With Uno Platform now providing contextual AI tooling [as part of Uno Platform Studio], it was the perfect time to throw up a small Holiday ‘coding’ challenge – or, rather have AI code it for you. We challenged the .NET developer community to get creative building a modern cross-platform .NET app with Uno Platform – bring in Santa Claus and some holiday cheer. Over the last week before Christmas 2025, we saw some wonderful submissions from the developer community – time to declare the winner.

A Holiday Challenge 🎄

Uno Platform is the most flexible open-source platform for modern cross-platform .NET development, complete with enterprise-grade AI and visual design tools. Paired with Uno Platform Studio, .NET developers can get a serious boost in productivity with Hot Design visual designer with Hot Reload for fastest C#/XAML dev loop, dependable AI Agents/MCP tools for contextual AI intelligence and flexibility in technology stack – all towards building apps from any OS/IDE to run on mobile, web, desktop or embedded devices.

During the latest Uno Platform Studio 2.0 launch webinar, we showed off what’s possible with .NET + Uno Platform + AI tooling – developers can now create complex UI with simple text Prompts from chosen IDE/AI Agent. Now, it was the .NET developer community’s turn to try things out and we threw up a simple challenge in line with Holiday vibes.

Yes, you read that right. Build a Santa Tracker/Christmas app and you could win 10,000 USD worth of Uno Platform Studio licenses and the best app gets a 1,000 USD cash prize!

Cheer and Creativity 🎅

Over the next one week, the .NET developer community stepped up and built exactly what was called for. We were once again blown away by what’s possible with .NET, Uno Platform and the right AI tools. Here are some of the highlights from submitted apps – each one bringing wonderful holiday cheer!

We appreciate developer time/effort on this challenge – each developer with a submission gets an Uno Platform Studio annual license, to continue the journey of building modern cross-platform .NET apps with Uno Platform & AI.

The Grand Prize Winner 🎉

Drumrolls. Now, let’s get to what you all have been waiting for – the grand prize winner for the Uno Platform Holiday Challenge. And the winner is … Michael Reyes!

Michael created a glorious Santa Tracker app, entirely with Uno Platform and AI. The app oozes holiday spirit with a festive bento-box layout, and a parallax background of emojis. There are aesthetic cards for relevant Santa tracking metrics, a timeline feed, reindeer status, weather alerts, a naughty nice scanner and even a radio and magic meter. We’re floored and love the holiday spirit combined with developer creativity.

Creativity Fueled by Tooling 🙌

Huge congratulations for all the submissions and to the winner of the Uno Platform Holiday App Challenge – it is mind blowing to see what’s possible when developers have the right tools for creation.

The Uno Platform Holiday App Challenge submissions were built with ❤️ using Uno Platform and AI – proving that .NET developers can create stunning cross-platform experiences that run everywhere from a single codebase. The right framework and AI tooling helps.

We can’t wait to see what you create next – cheers. And happy building in 2026!

Next Steps

Ready to boost your productivity and simplify cross-platform .NET development? Try Uno Platform today by downloading our extension for your preferred IDE and join our developer community.

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