AvalonLife is a pretty complete and full-featured implementation of John Conway’s Game of Life, which I created a couple of years ago as an experiment in WPF programming. I ended up writing a long feature on the creation of the program, which begins here. It has a ton of information on the background of the game, it’s rules, etc., as well as a pretty decent overview of WPF concepts.

The program doesn’t require any installation. Just unzip the package to a folder and run it. You can build and run your own models by clicking to turn cells on or off, or load and experiment with one of the many models included with the program. You can even drag and drop models from the Life Lexicon website and run those.

Downloads: AvalonLife, AvalonLife + Source