Microsoft Reaching Out To Hobbyists
From Computerworld comes a story about coding4fun, a site that MIcrosoft hopes will be a hub for hobbyist developers. It's good to see the largest software company on the planet thinking again about how to make programming fun and accessible. This comes on the heels of Microsoft's Express suite of cheaper versions of their core developer suites, which was also aimed at lowering the barrier to entry for programming. This will make things interesting--the coding4fun site is full of projects that used to be nearly exclusively the domain of open source, Java, and the other net.darlings. If there are low barriers to entry for both platforms, the differentiating factors will move to things like community passion, community openness, opportunities for fame, opportunities for money, and so on. Interesting times ahead ...
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Still it's difficult to imagine that people will become passionate about development on the Windows platform like they are for OS X and Linux where tools are free (not just 'cheaper').
It would be interesting if people feeling the urge to particpate in Coding4fun use cross-platform languages/frameworks such that the resulting programs run on any platform, not just windows. If people actually make a point of doing that will their code be posted to Coding4fun? It remains to be seen just how open this will be.
It's actually a good resource for a hobbyist.
For example, there are articles about using software to communicate with GPS and various other hardware devices -- it's really informative and written almost from a "blog" prespective.
But the articles generally center around the second version of the .NET Platform and it seems as though the articles are written by MSDN contributors.
Overall, it's a great resource on expanding your knowledge of Windows programming in non-traditional environments.
mcho
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