Backgammon and Connect4 for Windows Mobile

During the holidays my wife and I went back to visit our families in Mexico City where we are originally from. Again, during the flights I had enough spare time to build a couple of my favorite games, Backgammon and Connect4.

I've already built both games for Windows using Visual Basic 5 almost 11 years ago but as you would imagine I was far from feeling proud of the implementation. So this time I started from scratch and ended up with what I think are better versions of them (still not the best code, but pretty decent for just a few hours of coding). In fact the AI for the Backgammon version is a bit better and the Connect4 is faster and more suited for a Mobile device.

You can go with your PDA/Smartphone to http://www.carlosag.net/mobile/ to install both games or just click the images below to take you to the install page of each of them. Enjoy and feel free to add any feedback/features as comments to this blog post.

The one thing I learned during the development of these versions is that you do want to download the Windows Mobile 6 SDK if you are going to target that version (which is what my cell phone has), since it will add new Visual Studio 2005 Project Templates and new Emulator images which will help you a lot. For example I was trying to use buttons in my forms, and testing it in Pocket PC worked, but as soon as I tried them in my cell phone it crashed with a NotSupportedException. When I installed the SDK and switched to target that platform, Visual Studio immediately warned me that my platform didn't supported buttons which was great.

Bottom line I'm more and more amazed of how easy it is to build games in Windows Mobile and the things you can achieve with both Windows Mobile and the .NET Compact Framework.