• by Amy Corr , Staff Writer @MediaPostOTL, November 22, 2010

Microsoft continues to woo the developer crowd with tools only a techie could love. 

In September, the company created a fictional company, Web sites and products to promote Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. 

Around the same time, a tool was quietly added to Microsoft.com that allows programmers to hear their code as music.

The Sound of Code was created using many Microsoft products, including Silverlight 4, Expression Encoder 3 SDK, .NET Framework and Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform. 

The site, created by Wunderman, took two months to create and came to fruition following a brainstorming session for Microsoft's "Light up your Apps" project, encouraging developers to develop for Windows. 

Creative director Stuart Wallace and senior developer Mike Jecklin came up with the three-step process. Users drop code into a box, choose a language, music genre, and preview their song. Once crafted, the song, a WMA file, can be shared through Facebook, Twitter or email. 

For non-coders or those with no knowledge of basic codes, like myself, fear not, we can play around on the site and make code come to life! According to Charles Walsh, Account Director at Wunderman, "only a short bit of code is needed to produce a song. If you click on the help link at the bottom right of the site, you'll see some code samples you can drop in and use to get a feel for it." 

The end-result actually resembles a song, complete with guitar licks and beats, rather than meshing sounds and instruments together. 

Here's how it works. Sound of Code processes and parses code and scans it for keyword matches, branding it as code. Depending on the music genre chosen, XML files then map instruments to each keyword. Lastly, mathematical algorithms transform everything into a song. 

The biggest challenge was "mapping the sound samples and code snippets to song structure -- to actually make the output sound like a song vs. a random smattering of noise," said Walsh. 

More than 2,400 songs have been created, although Microsoft has no metric it hopes to reach with this campaign. The initiative was meant to be a fun and creative way to highlight something created using Microsoft tools.