Noughts and Crosses – a first Visual Studio Project (Visual Basic.net Coded Front End Version)

Noughts and Crosses – a first Visual Studio Project is designed as a first opportunity to code a Microsoft Visual Studio project from start to finish having finished a course of study learning C#, either through classes, self-study or following a tutorial.

Presented in a series of thirteen steps, the learner is guided through the whole process, from interface design to adding functionality through coding, to produce a noughts and crosses (tic tac toe) game. Towards the end of developing the game, a little twist is added which gives the opportunity to code a practical use of a Circular Queue.

Each step in the development process is supported by a fully commented coded example of a possible solution to prevent learners from hitting an insurmountable roadblock.

In this version, the learner builds the interface by writing code. This method offers the opportunity to see how, by using constants and placing controls mathematically relative to each other, ongoing maintenance and development of the solution can be simplified. It also shows how control arrays can be created and how to write efficient code by using a single handler to action the same event for all the controls within an array or of the same type on the form. The supplied example solutions use this approach.

Both versions offer an ideal gateway to developing the skills necessary to create one’s own, unique solutions to coding problems rather than following someone else’s style as in a tutorial. They also make an ideal jump-off point to using our File Handling Visual Studio project, which provides a one-stop guide to adding loading and saving functionality to an application.