The reboot of Coding4Fun

Today we are happy to announce the reboot of Coding4Fun; a site within Windows Dev Center that’s dedicated to exploring the lighter side of Windows 10 development. Our goal is pretty simple; create fun and interesting code samples that feature the more interesting APIs available on the Universal Windows Platform. Why? Coding is fun and fun is good. Fun can also be educational and by showing you some neat, unique, and sometimes time-saving capabilities, you’ll not only have something cool to show for your time investment, you’ll also walk away having learned something new.

Even though the focus of Coding4Fun has changed a bit over the years, our passion for development remains relentless. We are still as dedicated to delivering top quality, project-based content that includes complete, well-commented source code, provided under the MIT open-source license, and documentation on how to build the sample. But don’t feel obligated to build it yourself, just run the sample to take a look under the hood if you prefer.

Of course, not every project is going to appeal to every developer so a variety of project types, ranging in complexity, will be made available. Currently, we’ve got three projects posted but there are more in the pipeline.

Here are the available projects that you can explore right now:

1. FaceTheremin lets you create original music by moving your face (or multiple faces) to different positions in a camera’s view. The app uses face detection on a live video stream to trigger musical events by using new media API’s. FaceTheremin features the following APIs:
   • FaceTracker– Detects faces in VideoFrame objects and tracks faces across subsequent video frames.
   • AudioGraph class – parent of all nodes that make up the graph.
   • MediaCapture class– Provides functionality for capturing photos, audio, and videos from a capture device, such as a webcam.

   See it in action:
   

2. MusicServer is a music streaming app designed to simultaneously play a single track on many Windows 10 machines. It contains code to run on both a publisher, which sends out the music, and a subscriber, which uses a virtual speaker to play it. MusicServer features the following APIs:
   • Windows.Networking.Connectivity namespace– Retrieves connection profiles that provide connectivity, usage, and data plan information for established network connections. This data can be used by a connected application to take appropriate action when operating in challenging network scenarios or abiding by data plan limits set by a network provider.
   • Windows.Networking.Sockets namespace– Provides sockets and WebSockets classes to use for network communications and classes for real-time network notifications received in the background for Windows Store apps.
   • Windows.Storage.Streams namespace– Provides support for reading to and writing from sequential and random access streams.
   • MediaPlayer class  – Provides access to media playback functionality such as play, pause, fast-forward, rewind, and volume.
3. CardReader lets you create new contacts by capturing Media Elements from a live camera. It extracts text using OCR and integrates it into the People app. CardReader features the following APIs:
   • OcrEngine class– Provides optical character recognition (OCR) functionality.
   • DeviceInformation class– Allows access to well-known device properties as well as additional properties specified during device enumeration.
   • ContactManager class– Represents a service that source apps can call to access contact data.

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