Team:Wellesley Desyne/Tips Tricks

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Wellesley HCI iGEM Team: Welcome

== Surface Development ==
Getting started with Surface Development? Check out:

Microsoft's intro to Surface development
Intro to building a multi touch application
Seeing examples of applications is immensely helpful to understand how to implement your application. Microsoft has CodePlex, which allows you to see open source projects and download open source software.
Surface Development is built off of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), which provides the developer with a standard model to create rich and interesting User Interfaces. Definitely familiarize yourself with WPF if you want to develop for the Surface! Intro to WPF, Another WPF tutorial
The standard model mentioned above is MVVM, which is based on the model-view-controller model. Understanding this model is crucial to understanding how databinding, among other crucial concepts, will work in your application, and how to organize the architecture of your code. A brief overview
Stack Overflow is a great site, both for debugging and for learning more about development. Don’t overlook this resource! In particular, check out this particular Stack Overflow for tips on starting WPF development.
And for the basics of programming in C# (whether you need to learn or just brush up)
In the process of building your application, you’ll most likely need to pull information from the iGEM registry for specific parts. Make use of the Registry API, which allows you to extract information about a particular part efficiently.

== zSpace ==

Cassie made a guide to setting up zSpace in a new Unity project, which is a great starting point before starting anything else.
The basics of Unity3D
A simple Google search also helps with development in Unity
For support in zSpace, contact zSpace or post it to the forumson their website.
While coding, keep in mind the structure of the program is very important. If you put things in the wrong class, it could cause a lot of problems later. Think logically about where methods and objects belong before writing too much code.
Also remember that there are objects that are created dynamically(in code) and some that are created in Unity. You must apply scripts to the objects you create in Unity (even if they’re invisible) or else nothing will happen.

== Web Development ==