ChessChessCurrently developed in VS2005 VB.NET 2.0. Designed to be a simple implementation of chess for vb developers who want to play around with chess front-ends and engines or just trying out different features in Visual Studio which is what I basically like to do.
Specifically demonstrates having a separate DLL with Chess piece objects inheriting from a generic chess piece object which is what I was interested in originally during the VB6 era and I thought I might inspire an offspring who was into chess at the time to explore the fine art of programming.
The front end is very simple. Graphics are implemented with each chess piece being a control. That makes dragging and dropping easy. It's very simple therefore to create new images if that's the bit you'd like to play with.
The rules of the traditional game are mostly implemented with all the normal moves and castling but not currently en passant. You can only promote to a queen at the moment. If you wanted to implement a variant of chess that would be pretty simple; particularly if your variant uses traditional pieces and moves.
If you want to play with the engine part I've, there's basically one scoring routine that you could try different approaches with. It doesn't look at any more depth than what the board will look like (who can take who and so on) after each possible move. Going into more depth and seeing what the opponent might do or learning or other possible improvements I'm not planning to do at this stage.
A history is produced in a algebraic format but at this stage I haven't gone any further with importing or exporting methods. I looked at the Xboard/Winboard interface and it wouldn't be too hard to get this to talk to that which would be fun if I was interested in either using that front end or developing the engine further and having it compete with other engines like GNU's.
Zip file with executable if you want to just install it. Download the zip, extract the files and run setup. Chess.zip
Actually I'm not sure which files you need to make this work. Let me know if there's a problem. ChessSource.zip