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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

MaterialMaker tool for TUM informatics

I've been meaning to try out some C# programming, so I collaborated with a friend of mine who is pretty experienced with it on a small but useful project - a tool to automatically download and display our class materials. He had already coded up the interface and execution logic during a particularly boring lecture, but it was all hardcoded to his filesystem and required the materials to already be downloaded and in the right folders. I figured it would be useful to add some functionality and let the program automatically download the latest materials and organize these in a generic directory it creates itself.

To get to the materials, I used RSS links that contained .pdfs and .zips of all the files. I wrote some parsing logic for these, which basically looks for tags and then extracts the direct link to the file. The filename is then checked with the local folders, and if it isn't already there, the file is downloaded.
Screenshot:


If you're a CS student at TUM and would like to use this tool, you can download it from my website: http://home.in.tum.de/~dowling/index.html. It shouldn't be too hard for me to add support for other classes, if you're interested just shoot me a message.

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