20050419

Microsoft's Coding4fun

Microsoft has started a new project called Coding4fun similar to Google Code. It is based on the .NET framework and it has projects related to assembly, web coding, game development, XML based applications and other cool applications.
"Coding4Fun is all about giving something back to the hobbyist developer community," said Brian Keller, product manager for Visual Studio. "Coding4Fun is for the millions of hobbyist developers worldwide who write very cool software applications for fun – on the nights, on the weekends, in their spare time, whenever. We're excited to have the opportunity to bring new content and ideas to this audience, and it’s a two-way street where we can be inspired by their ideas as well!"
Microsoft has also released Express products which is a light weight version of Microsoft Visual Studio, which has easy-to-use and easy-to-learn tools for hobbyists, students and novice developers. The beta2 of this range of products were recently launched and it is available for free download.

There are some articles about game development using .NET framework and DirectX, and about how to create an assembly program that can be used to control a LED display panel and interface it with Windows Media Player ot iTunes to show the currently playing song. There are more cool articles about personal web site starter kit, and system monitors, etc.

This is a good thing started by Microsoft, but as it uses the Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET framework, I am not at all interested in that. I don't have the time to study a new, difficult language like C# or ASP.NET. I am more into easier and faster-to-develop languages like Python. I gotta learn Python during the semester holidays. I would also like to learn PHP/MySQL. I think Google Code is far better as it has projects which are written in C++. But in Google Code, we can develop over the already existing 4 projects. But I think in Microsoft's Coding4fun developers can submit their projects. There are already websites which do the same for many years and they were successful - Sourceforge.

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