Compile error: unexpected symbol '{' and 'else'

There are two issues in your code:

1. You have not created a body for your while statement. In other words you have not created {} braces to hold the code that should be looped. Which means that the loop will consist entirely of the Console.Write command right under it which will loop infinitely.

2. You have written if with a capital i which is invalid. That is what causes your compiler error.

If you add a body to your while statement that covers the code that should be looped, and change If to if like this:

using System;

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        int runningTotal = 0;
        bool keepGoing = true;

        while (keepGoing)
        { // Added opening curly brace
            Console.Write("Enter how many minutes you exercised or type \"quit\" to exit: ");

            string entry = Console.ReadLine();

            if(entry == "quit") // Changed If to if
            {
                keepGoing = false;
            }
            else
            {
                int minutes = int.Parse(entry);
                runningTotal += minutes;

                Console.WriteLine("You've entered " + runningTotal + " minutes");
            }
        } // Added ending curly brace
        Console.WriteLine("Goodbye");
    }
}

Then your code will work.

Also as a side note I do agree that coding without any error checking is very tedious. In fact the way I found your errors was by opening your code in Rider (a C# IDE similar to Visual Studio) and simply looking at the errors it highlighted.

When I went though the C# courses on Treehouse I did not use the workspaces, but instead used an IDE. There is nothing stopping you from doing so as the programs you are writing are just standard Console applications which can be written and ran in any C# IDE.

As long as you watch the videos and complete the challenges it won't affect your course progress to not use the workspace.