Winter 2005 UCLA CS 31 Section 1 (Shinnerl)

Last Update: 10:00AM Mon. 1/10/05

1. Which questions should I send to a TA and which to the Prof?

   Please send questions requesting clarification of the project specification directly to Prof. Shinnerl. Please send requests for help with how to do the project or debug your code to your TA.

2. When I try to install Visual Studio .NET, it asks me to insert a disk. I downloaded VS .Net, so what can I do if I don't have a disk?

   You probably need to install the Windows Component Upgrade for Visual Studio .NET first. Download it from the same site from which you got VS .NET.

3. Can we use Visual C++ 6.0?

   If you have C++ compiler other than Visual Studio .NET (e.g., g++ under LINUX) on your own computer, and you do not want to install Visual Studio .NET, you are free to use your own compiler during the course of your program development, but you must ensure that what you turn in will compile and run correctly under Visual Studio .NET. Be sure you budget enough time to transfer your program files to a SEASnet machine and fix any portability problems.

   Realize that pretty soon almost no one will be using VC 6.0, so proficiency with that tool is not a skill you should work on acquiring or improving.

4. When my program finishes executing, the console window disappears! How do I prevent that?

   You probably started execution by selecting the Start item from the Debug menu or by clicking the blue triangle icon on the toolbar. What you want to do is select the Start without debugging item from the Debug menu (with the red exclamation point icon).

5. When I try to build my program, I get the message

      error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _WinMain@16 referenced
   		  in function _WinMainCRTStartup
   

   What does that mean?

   When you see a linker error with that mention of _WinMain@16, it usually means that when you created your project, you didn't create it as a Console Application (see Step 4 of the Visual Studio .NET writeup. There's no simple way to change the type of an already created project, so create a new project and copy over your C++ source program.

   If you're using Visual C++ 6.0, you'll get a similar error if you create your project as a Win32 Application instead of as a Win32 Console Application.

6. On the Project 1 specifications page, it states that we need to include the 3 .cpp files and a report that shows the tested input/output values and explains the changes we made to the other two .cpp files. However, on the general programming project requirements page, it asks us to include "Implementor's documentation". Since we did not write this program, I was wondering if we needed to include this portion (ie the algorithm/flow chart). Lastly, it says to "Specify all sentinels and how to quit". Do we need to put anything for that in this case?

   Good point. Since you did not write the code for this project, you may skip the implementor's documentation. Since the program has no sentinels and no user commands are needed to terminate, you may skip that as well, for this project.