What techniques can I apply to my project at hand?

Question

Hi All,

With over a week off of work I wanted to try out a bunch of new stuff at home. What I've done is written a simple TicTacToe game that I want to incorporate things into that I've never worked with before. I have three main ideas first.

1. TCP/IP ability so that the app can be played over the internet.
2. Learn how to integrate tests into my builds in Visual Studio.
3. Develop my nant skills further by scripting my builds and such.

My question for stack overflow is what else would you recommend that is out of the ordinary that I could take a look at over the next week? Is there certain odd ball things you've come across as a developer that I may want to look at?

Thanks

Mike

Answer 1

use WPF (and/or silverlight) as your UI and use a ViewModel for the backing data.

Answer 2

That would depend on what you don't already know or use:

Maybe try out a few design patterns.

Use a new technology you're not familiar with: Spring, JQuery, Atlas/AJAX, Silverlight

Use TDD rigorously.

Answer 3

Try Neural Netwokrs as IA for play against the machine :D I saw one implementation of the tic tac toe with IA

Answer 4

Rewrite in a language you're not familiar with, like F#.

Answer 5

Experiment with DSLs for some part of the program. For an external DSL, use PowerShell to generate C# via CodeDom.

Answer 6

Refactor mercilessly. What happens if you strive for mostly 1-line methods, and 1-screen classes (but be smart about it).

Answer 7

Have a centric WCF Service to boot up players behind NAT. Store users' profiles & scores in some tables and use SubSonic to generate a DAL for you. Create a simplistic AI and try stress-loading your app with some virtual users and see how much it holds before it cracks down.