A small C# helperclass for boardgame-applications: allowable moves

Our students are creating classic boardgames using Silverlight. A problem that kept occurring was the following: “A player throws a certain number with the dice. How do I know, given his current location on the board, to which squares on the board the player is allowed to move to”.

I’ve written a small utility class that can be (re)used for simple applications where you have 2-dimensional map with certain squares on which the player can stand, and other not.
You can download the project here. Feel free to reuse/adapt. I’ve included to demo-usages.

Tutorial on Silverlight 4 databinding in code-behind, custom user controls, etc.

Introduction

This small tutorial was written to show the students the following aspects of Silverlight:

• Writing a class that can be used for databinding
• Perform data-binding through code instead of XAML
• Creating a custom user control
• Writing simple data converters

Suppose we are creating a Silverlight game in which each player is represented as a pawn. However, the player class itself is somewhere deep inside the game-engine and we would like the pawn user control to be only loosely coupled to this player class. By doing this, we are able to make a rapid Silverlight prototype and if we later decide that the frontend is pretty lame, we can simply redesign it without too much fuss.