I spend most of my day writing about ASP.NET or building ASP.NET applications for clients. As every ASP.NET developer knows, the bulk of ASP.NET development centers around data access - building pages to collect user input and crafting reports to summarize that information. To help break this monotony, I occasionally set aside an afternoon to work on a more interesting project, which helps rechage my batteries. I've shared such fun programming projects in past articles here on 4Guys (see Creating a Quick and Dirty Online Blackjack Game).
My immediate and extended family enjoys playing games, and one of the favorites is Boggle. Boggle is a word game trademarked by Parker Brothers and Hasbro that involves several players trying to find as many words as they can in a 4x4 grid of letters. At the end of the game, players compare the words they found. During this comparison I've always wondered what words we may have missed. Was there some elusive 10-letter word that no one unearthed? Did we only discover 25 solutions when there were 200 or more?
To answer these questions, I decided to create a Boggle solver and did so using ASP.NET version 3.5. The Boggle solver recursively explores the board and locates (and displays) all available solutions. With this nifty little web page, at the conclusion of each Boggle game we can see what words we missed.
This article is the first in a two-part series that details the application, its design, and some of the challenges faced when creating it. In this first
installment we will look at the user interface; the second installment examines the logic used to actually solve the puzzle. The complete source code
for the Boggle solving application is available at the end of the article. You can also see a live demo in action at www.ScottOnWriting.NET/Boggle.
Read on to learn more about this fun little project.
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