The purpose of this project is to teach people how to program in C# and .NET. It does this in two ways:

1. Beginners can learn the basics of C# by programming computer players for the classical Battleship game. In a class, each student can write her own player and afterwards they can check whose player is the best.

2. Advanced programmers can take a look at the implementation of the underlying runtime which is also written in C# and .NET. Trainers can use the sample to demonstrate various C# and .NET features working in a larger, non-trivial code base.

The history of this projects goes back many years. At that time, a group of developers at the company cubido wanted to demonstrate the capabilities of ASP.NET and Silverlight to customers. I (Rainer Stropek) was one of them. We implemented a coding challenge that we called C# Pirates. It allowed people to write and upload computer players for Battleship. In a rich GUI, players could play against each other and a leaderboard was continuously filled. The overall winners were awarded with gifts.

This project is a complete rewrite and works differently from the original C# Pirates. However, the basic idea of allowing people to write computer players for Battleship in C# has remained the same. Here is a list of workshops and courses in which it was used:

• The first version of this project was created for a workshop at the German BASTA conference in 2020 (presentation, YouTube recording of workshop (German))
• Multiple C# mini coding challenges in the CoderDojo Linz (Oct. 2020)

Did you use this project in one of your workshops or courses? Please add it to the list above by sending a pull request.

See project wiki.