Check MSDN’s New Coding4Fun site, the boring days of coding are now over because with this site it’s all about coding for fun, read bellow for more info!

Coding4Fun: Giving back to the Hobbyist Developer Community

Welcome to the Coding4Fun Developer Center!

At MSDN, we spend a lot of time talking about professional software development. After all – millions of individuals worldwide make their living designing, developing, testing, deploying and maintaining software applications. But that’s not what this developer center is about…

Even more people worldwide write software for fun not because they are being paid, but because they love to code. They love to build applications to analyze their Halo 2 scores, or display a cool screen saver, or show off their family photo album. They might write applications to help them with other hobbies, from gardening and genealogy to tricking out their cars and helping them remodel their house.

Who are these people? Let’s call them hobbyists. Encarta defines hobbyist as:

Hobbyist (noun): a person who has a hobby, especially a person who devotes a great deal of time to one

This sounds like an ideal definition. Especially the great deal of time part how many times have we found ourselves coding for fun at 4 o’clock in the morning, up to our elbows in pizza boxes and soda cans?

Sure, hobbyists could buy or download off-the-shelf software to do pretty much anything nowadays but what’s the fun and challenge in that? Hobbyists love doing it themselves. Hobbyist developers love solving problems, writing code to do cool things, and learning how other software and hardware works. Hobbyist developers take pride in writing code that meets their vision, and many even spend hours making their code not just functional, but elegant. For the same reason people love working on cars and cooking their own meals (like Alton Brown that guy rocks!) hobbyist developers love cracking open their favorite development environment, ordering a pizza, and working on their latest idea.

The Coding4Fun Developer Center was built by a few of us at Microsoft who also consider ourselves hobbyist developers on the nights and weekends. We built this site in our spare time, on a shoestring budget, with a whole lot of passion for giving back to the hobbyist developer community. We have signed up several awesome bloggers and writers who will be contributing regular articles to the Coding4Fun columns you see in the left-hand navigation menu. We’ll also link to some of the coolest projects and hobbyist news happening in the community.

Link to Coding4Fun Developer Center