Jesse Liberty

In a recent post, I discussed the DecryptR application I have been toying with.  While the fundamentals are working, there is much to do.  Today I’ll make a few minor improvements.

First, let’s set the font in the list box to a fixed font, so that the columns align better.  To do so I’ll open the application in Expression Blend.  In the Objects and Timeline I’ll click my way down to Results– the list box and then in the Text properties window I’ll set the font family to Courier New (a fixed width font) and the font size to 24.

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Periodically, I like to build a “glass house” application – that is one which I document as I go, hiding nothing and showing all the thinking that goes into the application as well as the raw, not ready-for-production code along the way.

DecryptR

DecryptR is a game, but one which will illustrate a number of Mango features.  It will not be written in XNA, but rather will be written in Xaml and C#. 

The idea of the game is that the computer thinks of a code, using n of the first m letters of the alphabet (where n and m are configurable).  Thus, we might decide that it will use 6 of the first 8 letters (A-H).  The code does not duplicate letters, so a typical code might be ACBFED but of course the code is not displayed.  Your job is to break the code.  Each “turn” you put in 6 letters and Decrypter tells you how many you matched, and how many were in the right position. 

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