Creating an Online Boggle Solver :: Solving the Puzzle

Author: aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com | Published: 10th Apr 2008 | Visited: 184 times | Add Comment
Filed in: SQL Server

My family enjoys playing games and one of our favorites is Boggle, an addictive word game where players attempt to find as many words in a 4x4 grid of letters. At the end of a game, players are left wondering whether there were any unearthed words. To answer this question once and for all, I created an online Boggle solver using ASP.NET version 3.5. This article is the second installment in a two-part series. Last week's article, Building the User Interface, examined the Boggle solver web page's user interface, which consists of 16 TextBox Web controls arranged in a 4x4 grid and three Button Web controls for solving the user-entered puzzle, solving a randomly-generated puzzle, and clearing the board. A ListView control is used to display the solutions in a three-column HTML <table>. The user interface also included a handful of JavaScript functions to ease entering the board data. This second and final installment details the code used to solve the puzzle. Solving the puzzle requires having a dictionary of legal words and objects that mirror the structure and functionality of the board and of solutions. These objects are implemented as classes that include internal data structures that use a number of features in the .NET Framework, including: Generics; automatic properties; and caching. The complete source code is available for download at the end of the article. Try out the live demo or read on to learn more! Read More >

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