Friday, May 16, 2014

Code Hunt - Microsoft Research's gamification of coding (which also shows off Pex Power!)

Microsoft Research Connections Blog - What if coding were a game?

"Well, now it is. Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of Code Hunt, a browser-based game for anyone who is interested in coding. We built Code Hunt to take advantage of the fact that any task can be more effective and sustainable when it’s fun. And Code Hunt is fun! It uses puzzles, which players explore by means of clues presented as test cases. Players iteratively modify their code to match the functional behavior of secret solutions. Once their code matches, lights flash and sounds play, letting players know that they have “captured” the code. Players then get a score, which depends on how elegant their solution is, and are encouraged to move on to the next puzzle or level.

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Code Hunt was developed by a team in Microsoft Research led by Principal Development Lead Nikolai Tillmann and Principal Research Software Engineer Peli de Halleux. It is based on Pex, Microsoft Research’s state-of-the-art implementation of dynamic symbolic execution (analyzing a program to determine what inputs cause each part of a program to execute), which is available as a Power Tool in Microsoft Visual Studio.

We look forward to Code Hunt’s further application and would be happy to receive inquiries regarding competitions or courses. But remember, anyone can play Code Hunt—for fun or to hone their coding skills. Just go to www.codehunt.com and start coding!"

 

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Something fun to play with at work today home this weekend...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
You are such a Code Digger... Code Digger VS2012 extension released (Think "Pex powered input/output analysis for Portable Libraries Extension")
RiSE4Fun - Microsoft Research, Research in Software Engineering, "Fun" Dev, via web, site
Playing with Pex is just a web browser away at www.pexforfun.com
Faking it in VS11 - Moles, the Microsoft mocking/isolation framework, is baked into VS11
Interested in PEX & MOLES? Wish you could go to a five hour workshop on them? Here’s the next best thing…
Pex 2010 (aka Pex 0.90.50303.0) now available on MSDN Subscribers Downloads
Pex license updated – You can now use it in commercial projects
Pex 0.5 Released - Your Parameterized Unit Test Buddy
Think you can’t unit test ASP.Net? Here’s a tutorial for one way, using the power of Pex and Moles

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