Advent of Code (AoC)

In 2023, I attempted Advent of Code in F#. It was my first experience with a functional programming language and was reasonably enjoyable, but I found that learning a new language while participating in Advent of Code was a bit too much. In 2024, that sentiment is resonating even more strongly as I have two small children at home now. I've decided that I would like to host my Advent of Code solutions for all years here in the language I use the most (C#).

Running Solutions

I looked into some previous years of Advent of Code and I noticed that most puzzles require you to write an algorithm that processes some randomized text. To accomodate this, I have established an C# console application project with command-line arguments:

Description:
  Bupé's solutions to Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com)

Usage:
  AOC [command] [options]

Options:
  --version       Show version information
  -?, -h, --help  Show help and usage information

Commands:
  ping         Send a request to the server to verify authenticated connection 
               is working correctly.
  solve        Solve the puzzle on a particular year and day.
  leaderboard  Request a leaderboard from the server and print it to the 
               console.

The solve command' uses System.Reflection (I know, I am definitely on Santa's naughty list this year), to select the solution code for each day and year. Each solution is an extension of the Solution class which must provide some key information about the solution (day, year and some functions that return the result of the solution given some input text).

public class DayXXYearYYYY() : Solution(yyyy, xx) {
    protected override object GetPart1Result(string input) {
        return /*solution to part 1*/;
    }

    protected override object GetPart2Result(string input) {
        return /*solution to part 2*/;
    }
}

As a test, I have included D00Example.cs in the project, which will print information about the input back to the console:

> .\AOC.exe solve -y 0 -d 0 -t "Hello World!"
Solution for part 1 of day 0 of 0 found in 00:00:00.0003227!

Sample solution for part 1 of day 0 of 0 found in 00:00:00.0002368!

{
  "Lines": [
    "Hello World!"
  ]
}

Sample solution for part 2 of day 0 of 0 found in 00:00:00.0002955!

{
  "CharCount": 12
}

For real year/day combinations, the application will also provide the solution using your actual puzzle input. The puzzle inout is automatically fetched from the server providing that a valid session ID is stored in the environment variable named AOC_SESSION_ID.

This tool does follow the automation guidelines on the /r/adventofcode community wiki. Specifically:

• Outbound calls are throttled to every 2.5 minutes (see Client.cs)
• The User-Agent points to this repository on Github (see Client.cs)
• Once inputs are downloaded, they are cached locally in app data (see PuzzleService.cs)