I am sure a lot of you have heard about Microsoft's Mix 10K Challenge, a contest for a program in 10kb of source-code using Silverlight, XBAPs or Click-once Apps. For my entry, I wanted to create a scrabble-like game using silverlight, with simplified rules and scoring. By the day of the deadline, I had a pretty completed version in about 40k, and perhaps with squeezing it would been down to 30k - still 3 times over the allotted limited. Given the size, I tried like to create a manual version of the game, by ripping out the engine - but still it wouldn't just fit - eventually, I submitted a skeleton of just a board with drag-n'-drop letters. Pretty lame, compared to what I had created - see the screenshots.
In 10K, the Entry
In 30-40K, the Non-Entry
Additionally, for the game I was to pull down a 170,000 + words list to validate the spelt words. Using LINQ, I managed to get the words list to roughly 300 kbs that loaded separately and later resided in the isolated store. Overall pretty neat, for a 20K runtime app - yet, nowhere close to what lots of guys got going in under 10K of source code.
For the app I submitted my biggest mistake was to rely on xaml (+databinding) for the UI, it clocked in about 4.5Kbs which I should have substituted for some kind of interaction logic. Anyway, I intend to put out the a polished version of the scrabble-like game with a new UI soon.
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