Fall '21 Week 6

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Hello, and welcome to the week six announcements video for cc 410 in Fall 2021. So this week you should be wrapping up the last part of the first chunk of the class, which is all about debugging and logging, lambda expressions. And you’re working on the third restaurant milestone which covers inheritance and polymorphism. So all of that is due later today. I’ll get that graded here in the next couple of days. Typically, restaurant milestone three is one of the ones where I try and spend a lot of time reading through your code considering the structure of your code and how you implemented the inheritance and polymorphism parts. And I try and give you a good code feedback on style. It’s also the first milestone where we enforce all of the basic requirements we introduced in hello world. So things like your style checker is going to be something that will really look into as well, as well as make sure you’re… making sure your unit tests achieve 100% code coverage and things like that. Also, this week, you should be scheduling your second final project meeting, please make sure you try and get that in before Thursday if you can, because I go on the road on Friday. This is just a quick chance for us to chat about the final project, maybe talk about some possible project topics you’ve been considering. You don’t really need to have much else done for your final project at this point. But hopefully you’re thinking of final project topics that you might want to take on and thinking about some of the classes and the structure of those classes that you might need to build that project.

So this week is pretty simple. We’re just shifting gears talking about graphical user interfaces, or GUIs. This week, and then you’ll be working on the fourth restaurant milestone, which is all about building a basic user interface for our programs. So the fourth milestone, it’s all about GUI basics, I basically what you’re going to do is create the overall structure of your GUI, all the different panels and frames that you need to manage a graphical user interface for this program, we don’t worry much about functionality other than the buttons you need to switch between the frames so that you can see them all. I’ll give you one example of how to build this in the example project. And then you can either adapt that example for this or you can kind of go your own way a little bit. This is a chance for you to get really creative on these projects. There’s lots of different ways you can build these GUIs. As long as they meet the minimum requirements, you’re good to go. Don’t forget to read the helpful hints in the assignment I try and give some hints of different coding patterns that I have found are really important and useful for me when building a graphical user interface. So hopefully some of that information is useful to you as well.

Looking ahead after that, the next module will do Event Driven Programming, where we talk about how we can actually make a GUI functional using events. Module eight, we’ll spend some time on design patterns and use that to build combos and orders for our program. If there’s one big takeaway from this part of the class, besides learning how to build GUIs, it is the use of design patterns. That’s something that you use an awful lot in industrial programming today. So that’s something that’s really important that we’ll focus on. And then after that, we’ll talk about libraries, releases, web API’s, etc.

So quick reminder, I go on vacation this Friday, October the first and I’ll be gone through the next week I get back on Sunday, October the 10th. During that time, I’ll have limited access to email and discord while I’m on the road, I’ll still be reading emails, paying attention to discord, but my responses may be a little slow and they may not be as verbose as they normally would be. Because of that, even though milestone four is due next Monday. grading of that milestone will be delayed for a week until I get back. I don’t expect any issues with that, that milestone is mainly just whether you built the frames and the panels and everything for your GUI. That’s really all we look at for that one. So you kind of know if you got it working or not. Based on previous semesters, I expect minimal questions on these next couple of milestones, they’re pretty straightforward to follow. But if there are tons of questions, or there’s things that I can’t handle easily remotely, I’m more than willing to adjust due dates if needed, and push things back a little bit just to give me some more time. I’m also going to work with another faculty member here at K-State so that they will officially be covering these courses and can provide a little backup to me as well. But most of the time, I’ll still be the one actually fielding questions and things like that even while I’m on the road. So feel free to ask questions, but be a little flexible and we’ll adjust due dates as needed.

Other than that, I think we’re really strumming along good this semester. Everything looks really good. I look forward to seeing your restaurant milestones and chatting with you about your final projects. And then hopefully these next couple of milestones building out a graphical user interface go well, but as always, feel free to let me know if you have any questions and I look forward to seeing you over the next couple weeks.

Subsections of Fall '21 Week 6