After eating Thanksgiving dinner with my family and returning to my house, I got a little bored.

A friend of mine just started a IT Consulting Company a few months ago. I was browsing his public GitHub Page the day before Thanksgiving and I noticed that one of his repositories was a coding challenge for interviews. There were 2 coding challenges and one of them was to determine a winner of a Tic Tac Toe game.

I had never attempted to do this, so I decided to spend a little time and take the Tic Tac Toe challenge. Completed Solution on GitHub here

Tech Stack

• C# 6
• FluentAssertions
• NUnit 3.5
• TestDriven.Net
• Visual Studio 2015

Insight into how I approach problems

Thoughts

• For the GameResultService, I probably should remove the constructor and pass the board into the GetResults Method. The coding challenge description seemed to indicated that you would just be given a board at a given point in time. I would need to make the change I have suggested, if it was interactive and I wanted to use the same service throughout the course of the game.
• I suspect that a lot of people would have come up with a nice algorithm that was more efficient and required less code.
• I thought about slapping a WinForms or even an AngularJS Front-End on it but I guess laziness is greater than boredom.

Edit:

• Forgot to mention, this solution assumes a 3x3 Game Board, if I have the ambition, I may attempt to make it N x N (2016-11-25)
• Looks like I forgot to code for “Deadlock” (2016-11-25)
• Added Deadlock logic to the application (2016-11-25)
• Passing the board into GameResultService.GameStatus method, so you don’t have to create a new service instance to continually check the board (2016-11-25)
• Created a new property on TicTacToeResult call Status that called overrided ToString that prints out the status of the game, so you don’t have to have IF statements to check (2016-11-25)
• IsWinner boolean removed in place of a enum value Winner, NoWinner and Deadlock. Went back and forth on enum vs add a new boolean called IsDeadlock. Went with enum even though I believe enums should be mutually exclusive. Technically, the results can be NoWinner and Deadlock. (2016-11-25)