SharePoint Game of Life Web Part on CodePlex

Earlier this year, I presented a session at SharePoint Saturday New York on the new SharePoint 2010 taxonomy features (Enterprise Metadata Management). At the time, I offered to provide the source code for the visual web part sample I used in the developer portion of the talk.

The sample is a simple SharePoint 2010 visual web part based on John Conway’s Game of Life cellular automaton. I wrote about the SharePoint Game of Life web part previously on this blog. If you’re interested in SharePoint taxonomy, you can also check out my blog series on Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM).

The idea is that each term in the SharePoint taxonomy term store represents an organism. As you run through each generation, terms are added and deleted based on the parameters of the simulation.

It took a few months, but I’ve cleaned it up, added better error handling and uploaded the code to the SharePoint 2010 Game of Life Web Part project on CodePlex. This project is written in C#. It requires Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Server.

The Long Tale: This SharePoint 2010 taxonomy sample is actually a port of an old-school ASP code sample that I wrote in 1999 for the NCompass Resolution API. Resolution went on to become Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS).