Monday May 14, 2012
Although it's almost five years old, this collection of collection classes is still very handy to have and compliments that which comes with C# 4.0. Wintellect is a name associated with Jeffrey Richter who wrote the C# CLR book which I'll be reviewing shortly.
The code has a good reputation; it's well written and includes a set, deque, a bag, biglist, multi dictionary and ordered dictionary as well as some similar to those with C# 4.0 (Dictionary, Hash). It comes with a .chm (Windows Hypertext help file) documenting it. Don't forget to right click and unblock that or it won't work.
Sunday May 13, 2012
I asked if the C# was valid (it was) and what the values of a and b would be. It was valid C# with a = 1, b = 2. As the two variables are static they have a default value of 0 before the initializers are executed.
Empire AI Design Doc
Before the Empire C Game programming tutorials start, I thought I'd explain how the AI for the computer player will work. You can read it in the Computer Empire AI Design Spec, the first of 2 or 3 tutorials on the AI.
Saturday May 12, 2012
The Thursday puzzle was C# as correctly guessed. It's a little known fact that the @character is valid in an identifier and this allows lines like class @class etc.
You can find this and other interesting but obscure parts in the C# 4.0 language specification. There's a 2.9MB downloadable htm version of it available from Microsoft.
Mud Server
In a past article I suggested it would be possible to create a Mud Server. Actually a bit more powerful than Mud, more accurately described as a text interface MMO, that can be accessed via a web browser so I'm having a go at writing one.
I've published the first spec. which is more of a design document and says how it's going to be implemented.
Friday May 11, 2012
using System;
class Test
{
static int a = b + 1;
static int b = a + 1;
static void Main() {
Console.WriteLine("a = {0}, b = {1}", a, b);
}
}
Without compiling it, can you say (a) if it will compile and (b) if it does, what values will it output? Answer on Sunday
