Lab Setup

Table of Contents

Environment

The labs will be tested and graded on Linux, so you need to make sure that it works in that environment. However, I completed all of the labs on macOS and did not see major differences. If you would like to use Windows to develop your labs, don’t. Sorry, the socket programming is different on Windows so it would require a lot of effort to have it support Windows and Linux. I can’t vouch for the Linux Subsystem, but you are welcome to try. Just know that all grading will be done using pure Linux (or a docker container running Linux). If you don’t have access to Linux or macOS on your machine, you can SSH into a CAEDM computer and develop from there, or install a VM on your machine.

Visual Studio Code

I highly recommend you use VS Code. It’s a good enough editor and has a lot of powerful extensions. Specifically, using the auto-formatting on save will save you a lot of trouble when you submit your code. Specifically, set up your VS Code C/C++ extension with the following Clang format specification:

{ BasedOnStyle: LLVM, UseTab: Never, IndentWidth: 4, TabWidth: 4, ColumnLimit: 100 }

(you can also change the ColumnLimit to 80, the default.)

Here is an example of my configuration:

Clang format configuration in VS Code

I even have it format my code on save.

Setting to format on save

Git Repositories

For the labs, we will be using GitHub Classroom. If you are unfamiliar with Git, now is the time to start learning. VSCode has some Git integrations which will make this easier.

For each lab, you will be given a link to start the lab. This will automatically create an empty GitHub repo for you for that lab. This is the only way to start and submit the lab! In order for your code to be graded, you must push your code to your repo.

To start the lab, you can import the boilerplate code that I will give you for each lab through the “Import code” button:

Screen shot of how to import code

Each lab page will have a link to the repo you should uses as your starting point.

If for some reason, I need to fix a problem with the starter code, you will need a way of pulling those changes down onto your computer. The easiest approach is to create another remote for your git repo. By default, you will have one remote, origin, which will point to your GitHub repo. Add another one using the following command:

  git remote add template [URL OF LAB TEMPLATE REPO]

If you ever need to pull down changes I made (I will let you know when this is the case), you can do the following:

git fetch template
git merge template/master