The tabs above contain all of the content required to complete the program assignments for ITSE 1330 unless otherwise specified in the assignment requirements. Given the abundance of valuable content available online, students are encouraged to also access the alternatives at the Resources tab.

Steps:

Enroll: austincc.edu.
Login to Blackboard.
Follow procedures as outlined in the Syllabus.
Complete the Orientation Exam and Assignments by the due dates.

See the Syllabus for more information about course policies and procedures.

Visual Studio

Installation

There are a number of Visual Studio (VS) versions available. A comparison chart of the various versions and features of VS can be viewed here. For this course, we will use VS Community (Professional or Enterprise are also fine). The VS Community version is available for free to students, open source contributors, and individuals. I recommend using the public version of VS Community which is covered in the Download and Installation sections below. The installation should be accomplished within the first three days of the course start date since a project is due soon after the course begins.

Visual Studio can also be acquired by ACC Computer Science students via the Microsoft Imagine (MI) program. Download and install VS from Microsoft Imagine. See the General Course Policies at the bottom of the Syllabus for more information about the MI login procedures.

Download

Navigate to the Visual Studio download page here. Uh oh! What if that link is broken? What is a whip-smart developer to do? That's right, call on your buddy (and mine) the Google machine or the Bing mobile. Either will serve you well. In other words, don't allow the many, many small challenges that consistently confront developers to impede your progress. Keep calm and code on.

Installation

D-click the VS icon or filename at your download location.

The Update option appeared for me since I had a previous version of VS installed. I selected Update.

The VS Installer begins to work.

Packages are downloaded and installed.

At any time in the future, when you want to modify an installation, you can run the VS Installer from the Start Menu. If you do not see it listed there, you might need to download as we did above. Only the installer will be downloaded until you make more selections.

Then select Modify when the installer opens. You may need to select the Available tab to see versions available for installation.

The .NET desktop development workload is the only one required for this class. That selection contains .NET Core and .NET Frameworks up to 4.6. The Individual components tab enables more refined selections. To add or remove workloads or other items in the future, just run the VS Installer.

Even though VS Community is free, at some point during the installation or perhaps 30-90 days later, you will likely be required to login using your (free) Microsoft account. To continue using Community, create an account if you do not have one. See content here to learn more about VS sign in.

Now that we a C# compiler installed and supporting frameworks, we can move on.

What's Next?

We are now ready to start coding using the command line.