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Giving Back To The Hobbyist Community

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"The MITS Altair inspired a new generation of technology enthusiasts, including Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who were among the first of these early hobbyists to realize that the key to the future of personal computing lay in the unlimited potential of software." - Source

Back in 1975, Microsoft started out as *the* hobbyist company for a nascient software industry. While many things have changed since then, we always had a special place in our hearts for hobbyists. In 2005, we're going to make sure to give a lot of love back to our true roots - the  hobbyist community.

Announcing the Coding4Fun Web Site on MSDN

The Coding4Fun Web site is dedicated to, well, coding for fun. We found our favorite writers and bloggers and asked them to write about cool stuff their passionate about. Below is the first set of articles we've launched the site with. There's a lot more and we think you'll really, really like what we have coming :)

Peter Bernhardt is writing the "XML for Fun" column and shows how easy it is to use Amazon's XML Web services.

Sean Campbell from 3Leaf is writing the "In the Box" column and walks through creating a basic network utility.

Bill Evjen walks you through creating your own personal Web site with the Personal Web Site Starter Kit.

Scott Hanselman kicks off his "Some Assembly Required" column by showing how to program a system tray application and  LED display to show What's Playing in Windows Media Player.

Jeff Key starts his Cool Applications column with a beautiful System Monitor to monitor the Event Log, disk space, network availability, and more.

Derek Piersen kicks off his multi-part Beginner Game Development series by walking through the basics of game development using Managed DirectX. The Game Development series walks you through step-by-step in creating a fully-fledged game. Very cool.

We Want Your Feedback!
A lot more, really, really cool plans. We have ideas, our writers have ideas, but more importantly we want to here your ideas. What can we do to give back to the hobbyist community? How can we get people excited about programming cool stuff? Post your comments or email your ideas to code4fun@microsoft.com.

 

Big Thank You's
I first want to thank our amazing writers who have totally exceeded my expectations. This site's going to rock! I also want to thank the good folks at MSDN who gave us a home and helped this labor of love project happen. Big thanks to Kent Sharkey, John Serna, Chris Dahl, Brian Johnson, the original Coding4Fun MDSN author, Duncan MacKenzie and of course Brian Keller who pulled one too many all-nighters to get this site up and running.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2005
    Sometimes the world of software development is far too serious, so the
    guys from the Visual Studio team...
  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2005
    Ohhh now this is just cool.

    I really think some of the best learning tools are when you just doing it for fun. Fun Projects are just great way to learn and have fun learning at the same time. DHTML Dude used to always be one of my favorite articles because it was fun stuff. While not always practical you learned practical stuff you could use elsewhere and how to do it properly.

    Unfortunately this is now going to cut into that valuable resource I call sleep for a while, while I dig in and check it all out. Some really cool projects up there.
  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2005
    I had to do it... Everyone else is doing it...


    There were several things, but the biggest...
  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2005
    This looks really cool and is the kind of site that I've been wishing Microsoft would put out for a while now.

    On the game development front, Flipcode has a groovy feed of game development related headlines.
    http://www.flipcode.org/
  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2005
    An RSS feed is now available for Coding4Fun at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/rss.xml
  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2005
    Interesting Finds this week
  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2005
    Nice post

    I think that's an LCD display, however.
  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2005
    Derek's game development article is really a 'Good' kickstart for future (managed!!) game developers.
  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2005
    The comment has been removed