CS 230 Fall 2006                                                Assignment 9 – Files                                                                                        100 points

Assigned: 11/01/2006

Due: 11/10/2006 at the start of class (Note, we will have a new assignment for lab on 11/9)

Pre-Lab (Do Before Lab):  Bring a new disk. Plan out tasks, objects, and events needed for program. Plan out major pseudocode

Main Assignment:

E-Vote Inc is working on a new program to cash in on the electronic voting era. Your program is a simplification dealing with voting for one office. The program should get from a file (voters.txt) a list of voter Ids and voter names and display them in a list box. It should also get from another file (candidates.txt) a list of candidates and put them in a list box or combo box. When the user selects a voter from the voter list box, their information should be displayed in read-only text boxes or in labels. When a user then selects the candidate from the combo box (or list box) AND selects a “Vote” button, write the vote (voterId, name and candidate selected) to a comma-delimited text file for later tabulation (add it to those already in the file), and remove the voter from the list box of eligible voters. (DO NOT have the vote recorded immediately upon selection in case of inadvertent click). Provide the vote capability and an exit capability.

Hand in:

• Floppy disk with an entire folder containing all files related to the project.  Please set the name of the project to something other than the default name (WindowsApplication1, …). Use Windows to copy the whole folder, instead of trying to “Save As”.
• Print out of your code.

Miscellaneous:

• You must turn on Option Explicit and Option Strict.
• Display voter name and ID for selected voter in separate controls – you will need to separate the info, as done in class for DVDs.
• For validation, ensure that when the vote button is selected that the voter and candidate have both already been selected.
• After the vote button has been recorded, give the voter some kind of confirmation (e.g. a msgbox) and automatically clear the voter and candidate choices.
• You must use the filenames specified above, so I can easily test a bunch of different programs in a row. Sample files are provided on the assignments page of my www site. In the spirit of thorough testing of programs, you should try other versions of files as well.
• Remove the voter from the list box using listboxname.Items.Remove(itemtoremove) where itemtoremove is a string to be removed.
• When you remove the voter from the voter listbox, that will result automatically in a change to the item selected property of the list box, triggering an event. Your event procedure needs to protect against that crashing your program (the selected item will be set to “nothing” which is a built in value – typing it in (nothing) you should see it turn blue.  To test if a selected item is nothing you can do a test checking:  listboxname.SelectedItem is Nothing
• We have covered procedures and functions – I recommend that you continue to use them (e.g. extracting a line of text from the text in a file).

· MAKE SURE YOUR PROGRAM WORKS!

· Put YOUR NAME, e-mail address, date, and purpose of the program in comments at the beginning of the program.

· You MUST include comments that explain your program in order to get full credit.

· Remember to use meaningful variable names, and indent to show the structure of the program (VB usually does this correctly).

· Put your name on the form as a Label or as part of the form title.

· Try to use good user interface design. Make clear what user needs to do and what the answers mean.