F# PacMan!

Phil Trelford's Array - Pacman Tiles

Back in January I built a sample Pacman maze script in F# to use at a Pacman Kata evening with the F#unctional Londoners group. Coincidentally there’s another Coding Kata this Thursday 26th July at Skills Matter. Anyway a couple of weeks ago I started playing with the sample again on the train to and from work, filling in some of the gameplay.

You can play the latest version with your cursor keys and 9 lives below:

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Windows 8

As the sample runs in Silverlight I thought I’d also try it out on it’s cousin WinRT. WinRT lets you build Metro apps on Windows 8. The transition code wise has been pretty straight forward and I now have a tile for the game appearing on my Windows 8 start page:

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WinRT is yet another XAML based framework, and is very similar to Silverlight and WPF. One of the few differences I have encountered has been the namespaces the classes are in. For example in Silverlight the Canvas class is in the System.Windows.Controls namespace and in WinRT it is in Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls namespace. It is possible to target both WinRT and Silverlight from the same source code using conditional directives:

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The WinRT version of the app is implemented in F# and C#. The game part is written in F# as a portable library and the plumbing in C#. There’s a great walkthrough on Creating a Portable F# Library over on MSDN which describes this direction in some detail.

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Who doesn't like a little PacMan written in C#/F# that was converted from Silverlight to run on WinRT and uses the power of the Portable Library? noom... noom... noom...  :)