Basic Tutorial

This tutorial introduces you to the basic concepts of NShape. As an example you will develop an application that reads Web statistics data from a file and displays a diagram of referring and referred pages. The user will be able to layout this diagram and add annotations but he will not have the right to modify the actual data.

In order to actively follow this tutorial, you will need Visual Studio 2008 with NShape 1.0.2 or higher installed. The tutorial uses C# for the sample code and expects you to be familiar with that language. The complete source code for this tutorial is available on the NShape homepage at http://code.google.com/p/nshape/. Unzip it into the NShape directory in the Public folder on your machine, where "Demo Programs", "Demo Projects" and "NShape Source" are located too.

The tutorial consists of several steps, each introducing a new NShape concept and enhancing the sample application.

1.	Basic Application: Introduces the main components of NShape. Opens a diagramming project and displays it.

2.	Editing: Explains how diagrams can be edited by the user.

3.	Creating Diagrams: Shows how a diagram can be created and displayed from code.

4.	Connecting Shapes: Describes the connection types and how they can be used.

5.	Styles: Demonstrates how styles are created, modified and employed.

6.	Layout: Adds automatic layouting to the sample program.

7.	Libraries: Presents the idea of libraries and their usage.

8.	Templates: Gives a first insight in the concept and application of templates.

9.	Permissions: Prevents the user from manipulating essential information.

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