Lloyd Humphreys, 14, was recently handed an $11,000 one year premium subscription to Microsoft's developer network for a screencast presentation of his expression blend tutorial software, which won an international competition.

The youngster has also recently set up his own company, GX Design, and designed software and websites for a number of clients and companies across the globe.

He said: "I was quite happy to hear that I had won, although the night before I was told I had made the final four, and this in itself made me quite excited."

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, Lloyd added: "This is a quarter hour video in which you'll learn exactly how to create quick and easy music played in C#.

"Expression blend is used to style your own controls and use clever controls to present some information about the song playing."

The competition was set up by Italian programmer Christian Liensberger, who described Lloyd's entry as one that was done "very well".

He said: "Despite of the content being more for beginners, it was delivered in a way that even professional people enjoyed watching the screencast without getting bored or fast forwarding parts of it.

"The highlighting of important features was also done very well."

When not designing software, Lloyd tends to spend his time like most other teenagers, hanging out with friends, playing badminton and supporting Chelsea: "But not religiously!", he hastens to add.