Need to find your local Windows Phone Champion? Here's an OData service, Phone app and source that will help - Init

<body> <h1>Need to find your local Windows Phone Champion? Here's an OData service, Phone app and source that will help</h1> <p>Today's Mobile Monday post is one that I thought could dispatch a number of birds with a single post...</p><ul><li>Show off a kind of cool OData data source </li><li>How to use your location and others to see how "close" you are </li><li>Help you find your local Windows Phone Champion </li><li>Give you an app, with source, that brings both of those together </li></ul><h2><a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/02/17/find-my-champ.aspx" target="_blank">Find My Champ</a></h2><blockquote><p>What do you think of when you hear the word “Champ”? Someone who is the best? A sports champion? How about someone who fights for a cause? Here at Microsoft we have employees called “Developer Evangelists”. Part of their job is to help get the word out about Microsoft products and technologies. The other part of their job is to champion our developers.</p><p>Here in Windows Phone we call our evangelists “Phone Champs”. Champs ensure our developers get exactly the help & support they need and are the voice of the developer community. They are all experts on our platform and serve as local resources to answer questions from current or prospective developers. Champs can help you troubleshoot a problem in your app and can help you get your hands on a phone for testing. Oh, and some of our Champs are really funny and can tell you a good joke or two. <img src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-84-metablogapi/2210.wlEmoticon_2D00_smile_5F00_4904DFAD.png" alt="Smile"></p><p>So how do you find one of our great Phone Champs? Today I’m happy to announce a new application to help you find them. We originally wanted to call the app “Champ Acquisition and Discovery 1.0 for Workgroups Windows Phone Edition.” Luckily cooler heads prevailed and we’re calling it “Find My Champ”.</p><p>...</p><p><strong>Get the App</strong></p><p>Go <a href="http://findmychamp.codeplex.com/">download the app’s source code</a>. Compile the code in our <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27570">dev tools</a> and side-load Find My Champ onto your developer device or into the emulator. The app will also be in the Marketplace soon for you to download. Find your local Phone Champ and get in touch with them. Ask them for help with your app or to let you know about events or hackathons in your area.</p><p>We’d love to get your feedback on the Find My Champ application. Tell us what we can do to make it more useful. You can also come help us improve the app on <a href="http://findmychamp.codeplex.com/">Codeplex</a>. Additionally, I suspect that many of you will have creative ideas for how to use the <a href="http://champ.cloudapp.net/ChampDataService.svc">Champs OData feed</a> in other applications, mashups, etc. Please let me know what you create!</p></blockquote><p>The first thing that I thought was cool was that this is backed on an <a href="http://champ.cloudapp.net/ChampDataService.svc">OData feed</a>. This means that if we, the development community want to present our own view of the data, in our own apps, we can very easily.</p><p>Using the <a href="http://champ.cloudapp.net/ChampDataService.svc">OData feed</a> is very easy. Here's a snap from the must have <a href="http://www.linqpad.net/" target="_blank">LINQPad</a> utility querying the feed.</p><p><a href="http://files.channel9.msdn.com/wlwimages/ae054c0b4d7b402ab1239e6800c0220f/SNAGHTML13e2501a%5B3%5D.png" target="_blank"><img title="SNAGHTML13e2501a" src="http://files.channel9.msdn.com/wlwimages/ae054c0b4d7b402ab1239e6800c0220f/SNAGHTML13e2501a_thumb.png" alt="SNAGHTML13e2501a" width="650" height="283" border="0"></a></p><p>LINQPad makes it almost too easy to play with this feed. Say I want all the Champs with a Last Name starting with E, order by LastName?</p><p><a href="http://files.channel9.msdn.com/wlwimages/ae054c0b4d7b402ab1239e6800c0220f/image%5B2%5D-35.png" </body>