Can it be a game if no one wins?

The Connect Four game is moving along nicely. I will hit my goal of having a complete game by Friday. Though it may not be up on Sourceforge as a Release Download till the weekend. For now it will just be a .zip file of the executable, .dll's, image files. But I need to test it one of my non-development systems to make sure it works.

There two things left that need to be done. First, I need to have the game determine any "Game Over" conditions. And then I need to display some sort of notification of the Game Over condition. The sophistication of that display will depend on how much time I have left after the logic is done.

In other news, I have been reading Code Complete and I am about a quarter of the way though. It is an 800+ page text and I get though a chapter or two a night. Depends on what is on TV. I really like it. In away, I have already experienced a good deal of what he talks about in the book. But it puts all the little tid-bits of programing wisdom I have gathered over 25 years in one place. Also it defines terms to concepts I already held and giving me more to consider. It is now giving me a vocabulary to better describe the issues that I see with my own code.

For example, right now the main class in the Connect Four game seems to be doing too much, I am worried about its level of abstraction. Also, looking at how I wrote some of the earlier functions, I am making assumptions about data structures that are mostly valid, but ones I should not make if I were to consider each class more isolated. I already have a decent list of things I would like to refactor but I have my deadline to make. Thus it is with any software project, "It is never complete, only released."

You can always refactor a program to bring it inline with a different set of coding ideals. Most of the time, it is because you can do something one of two ways that would still be considered "Best Coding Practices." Though I suspect that one could even constantly refactor "Hello World" till the cows came home.