If you wish to do your assignments on a PC, you will need either Windows 2000, XP, or
Vista and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Note that Windows 98 or Me are not able to run Visual Studio 2005. You should be familiar with the Windows operating system and PCs in general, and be willing and able to figure out the Visual Studio 2005 environment.

The emphasis in class will be on general programming concepts, not on the workings of Visual Studio (often referred to as just VS), and the code you write will be virtually identical to code written by students using a Macintosh.

Note that currently the cluster and Lair (the Tressider computer cluster) computers do not have VS 2005 installed. They have VS 2003, but it does not have our libraries. We are hoping that we will have this fixed soon. We will make an announcement on the course website when we have a version of VS on the Stanford computers with our libraries

Getting Started
In order to use your PC to write the programs for the class, you will need to install both a compiler and the special 106 libraries for your system.

Step #1: Getting and installing the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 compiler
For CS106X, we are using Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 compiler. To install VS, you will download disk images of the installer CDs, burn them to physical CDs, and then use those to install the program. The easy way to do this is to go to http://msdn-ee.stanford.edu/VisStud2005.html and click on “Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition CD1” and “Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition CD2” to download the disk images (Note that this download may take quite a while, as the files are large.). Once you have the disk images, burn the first CD file to a CD, and then the second. Insert the CD with the first file on it. You should see a dialog box with several options. You should click on the first one, which will install Visual Studio 2005. Follow the resulting prompts, and wait for the installation to complete. Congratulations! You now have Visual Studio installed on your computer.

Step #2: Getting the CS106 libraries
Next you will need to get the CS106 libraries that we’ll be using throughout the course. Please use the following directions to install these libraries on your PC.

Download pdf Using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET