Visual C# Express 2005: Creating a Poker Application, Source Download
Answering a couple of user questions for persistence:
How do you test during the development of an application like Poker? Well, I'd say that the design and whiteboard sketches that I'm going to have in my book really help limit the amount of testing that has to be done. As for all of the protection that is added to the engine, you just have to be really careful with every input and output variable. Once you've done immutability and code protection scenarios enough you know what to look for. After completing the presentation, I know there are things in regards to immutability that I missed. I had even planned on talking about some of them, but I didn't have the time.
Why do you use generics so extensively? Well, generic lists are just much faster in terms of performance. The new Comparison and Predicate methods are awesome and allow for very quick aggregation of sub-lists. Maybe the presentation was a bit of overkill on the generics, but at the end of the day, you have a fully functional and reusable Deck of cards that can be extended by creating new Card types. My hope is that the Deck can be used to play any game that requires a deck of cards with limited changes.
Well, those were the two big ones. The source is up on http://www.games4dotnet.com/Downloads/PokerDemo1.zip. It is exactly what I used for the web-cast and isn't nearly the final version of the application. In fact the designed UI for the final demo was created solely for the web-cast, since it was much more functional than a DirectX display would have been. Unfortunately, some very cool samples I had planned for upgrading the application didn't make it into the presentation, but there are some TODO's layered over the code. Let me know if you make any changes to the application, I'd love to hear about it!