Question

I have an if else statement that identifies whether or not users have won my tic tac toe game however it’s my mission! 🙂 to make the code more compact and easier to read and I have lots of duplicate blocks of code and reduce the amount of code I have.

here’s some of my code:

if (button1.Text == "X" & button2.Text == "X" & button3.Text == "X")
{
    foreach (Button button in addButton())
    {
        button1.BackColor = Color.Green;
        button2.BackColor = Color.Green;
        button3.BackColor = Color.Green;
        button.Enabled = false;
    }
}
else if (button1.Text == "X" & button4.Text == "X" & button7.Text == "X")
{
    foreach (Button button in addButton())
    {
        button1.BackColor = Color.Green;
        button4.BackColor = Color.Green;
        button7.BackColor = Color.Green;
        button.Enabled = false;
    }
}
else if (button1.Text == "X" & button5.Text == "X" & button9.Text == "X")
{
    foreach (Button button in addButton())
    {
        button1.BackColor = Color.Green;
        button4.BackColor = Color.Green;
        button7.BackColor = Color.Green;
        button.Enabled = false;
    }
}

I was thinking maybe I could put this in a private method? But not sure if you actually can and I wouldn’t know how to call upon the method, or even a class?

Answer 1

Use an underlying data model to represent your data. Let’s say an array of ints.

int[,] board  = new int[,] {{0,0,0}, {0,0,0},{0,0,0}};

Then anytime an X is played, you set that position in the array to 1.

Anytime an O is played, you set the position to -1.

To check for a winner, you simply loop over your winning combinations, across, down, and the 2 cross patters and if they = 3 X wins and if they = -3 then O wins.