Rewriting Story

The Solitaire game example has published before on the Symbian C++ and Qt platforms. Now it was time to implement the game on the Windows Phone.

C Sharp is like Java or Qt. It is easy for a Qt developer to get into. You can find Windows Phone tutorials here: ​http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ff380145

The Solitaire game logic is quite simple, it only has one method that must be ported into C Sharp.

General high level functionality that must be implemented on all platforms:

• Loading 2D card textures with ​ContentManager
• Detecting touch events with ​TouchPanel
• Drawing images on the screen with ​SpriteBatch

The biggest difference between platforms is that XNASolitaire is made on Windows Phone ​XNA Game Studio. With XNA Game Studio you can create games for Windows, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 7. The XNA application runs on a ​game loop that runs at about 30 FPS. You have to handle all drawing and detect touch positions in that game loop.

Class diagram

Cards are shuffled to different decks. The deck class is the base class for the other decks, which have some specific functionality. For example, the cards in the TargetDeck are positioned accurately on top of each other.

Tombstoning

Windows Phone 7 executes one application at a time. When switching to another application, the current application is tombstoned = terminated. The application state must be saved before termination to enable the user to later continue the game from the same position. Solitaire stores deck data on termination. When the user navigates back to a tombstoned application, the application is recreated and the current state is restored. Read more about ​Windows Phone Execution Model.

When an application is to be tombstoned, a ​Deactivated event is sent. An ​Activated event is sent when an application is restored from tombstoned state back to running state.

Solitaire decks are stored in the application's private ​Isolated Storage using ​XMLSerializer. The serialised data class and member variables must be public.

Optional changes

The base class for game components in the XNA framework is ​GameComponent, which provides a modular way of adding functionality to a game. If a component loads and draws graphics, the content derives from ​DrawableGameComponent. It is good design to derive your game views from DrawableGameComponent.

A card in Solitaire XNA example is more like a struct that only contains card position and texture. The card could be derived from DrawableGameComponent if wanted.

Project information

• Project name: Solitaire XNA
• Project identifier: xnasolitaire
• Owner: tepaa
• Create date: 2011-03-14 10:04:52
• Project url: xnasolitaire
• Version control: https://projects.developer.nokia.com/svn/xnasolitaire/
• Project (WebDAV) shared folder: https://projects.developer.nokia.com/dav/xnasolitaire/
• Downloads: Downloads

Downloads

ID	File	Description	Size	Uploaded	Dls	Uploader	Component	Version	Platform	Type
17	SolitaireXNA_v1_0.zip	source code	1.7 MB	31 May 2011	1993	tepaa		1.0	Windows	Source
16	SolitaireXNA_v1_0.xap	binary package	553.9 KB	30 May 2011	258	tepaa		1.0	Windows Phone	Binary
12	XNASolitaire_v0_9_5.zip		602.4 KB	30 May 2011	66	tepaa		0.9.5	Windows Phone	Source