In this class you may be asked to download and use a provided ‘starter project’, so that instead of writing everything yourself, from scratch, you will instead be given an existing project, and some code, and you will have to extend, rather than starting from scratch. This document will give you some quick pointers about how to obtain such a project.

First, please watch the following videos to understand the overall process
NOTE: While you are expected to watch and understand the content of these videos, there are no viewing quiz questions about them, nor are you required to outline them.

These are the same videos that were listed on the Start O fLecture Slides page (you only have to watch them once)

• Workflow overview (7:23)
• How to get Visual Studio (3:22)
• How to do the work in this class (overview of detailed steps) (1:26)
  1. Download the starter project (0:59)
  2. Extract the files from the starter project (0:59)
  3. Edit, Compile, Run, and Debug (3:00)
  4. Compress your work into a .ZIP archive file (3:07)
  5. Remove extra, unneeded files (2:48)
  6. Upload Your Work (0:12) - there are more detailed videos about StudentTracker elsewhere

 

Before reading this, you will need to know what a ‘project’ is. Make sure that you’ve read the document, watched the video, and tried creating your own C# project (in the other, separate exercise) before doing this one.

1. Download the project

   Find the link (on the website) the project that you want to download. The safest way to actually download it is to RIGHT-CLICK on the link, and then select ‘Save Link As…’ from the context menu that appears, as pictured to the left

   You will then be asked where you want to save the project. Save it someplace appropriate, and remember where you put it. Notice that you are downloading a single file, which typically ends with .ZIP. If you haven't done so yet, you should set up Windows to show you the file extensions

2. Decompress the project

   Start the ‘Windows Explorer’ program. Navigate to the place where you put the .ZIP, right-click on the .ZIP, and select one of the “Extract” options. This will decompress, and separate out, each of the individual files that are included in the single .ZIP file.

3. Open up the project, and get to work!

   Find the ‘Solution’ file, or the ‘Project’ file. If you just extracted everything, this may be in a subdirectory. Double-click it, and it should open up in your Visual Studio program.

4. Re-compress to hand it in

   Once you’re done, you can have Windows re-compress everything into a .ZIP file. RIGHT-CLICK on the folder that contains all your work, and select “Send To”, then “Compressed Folder”, as pictured below: