C# and .Net project cluster May 2005

News

• There's a list of actual registered projects.
• Important dates are found under Project cluster plan and contents.
• There's a list of project proposals.

Goal and requirements

Goal

The goal of the project cluster is to give students a chance to familiarize themselves with the C# programming language and the .Net class libraries, including the new version 2.0 features. To achieve this goal, students must write a substantial piece of software in C# 2.0, document it, and to some extent compare with Java or some other language they know.
In addition, students are welcome to explore the features and gadgets of Visual C# Express or Visual Studio 2005 (if available) and the extensive .Net libraries, but the teaching of these facilities is not a goal of the project cluster.

Required background

To take part in this project cluster, the student must have followed the course Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) at ITU or have similar knowledge of Java or another high-level language from elsewhere. Moreover, the student must have experience writing a non-trivial program (more than 500 lines), for instance from a four-week project.

Project and report requirements

(a) Write a project description stating the goals and success criteria of your project. (b) Develop a substantial piece of software using features of C#/.Net not found on the Java platform. (c) Write a report that describes your software and how you developed it. Possible report contents: requirements, analysis, design, description and evaluation of the resulting software; notable differences from Java (or other platforms you know), and any other topic that seems relevant. There's a brief guide to ITU four-week reports in Danish and in English translation.
Students who are already familiar with C# or even with C# 2.0 should make a rather ambitious project, involving new or rarely used features, or a project with more academic perspective, such as an in-depth comparison of some particular aspect of C# and Java (or should not make a project in this cluster at all).
As usual, remember that the basis for the oral examination is your report and your presentation. Do not expect teacher and external examiner to have time to experiment with your program or digest all the source code.

• Wednesday 20 April at 1300-1400 in lecture hall 3 we meet to select projects and form groups of 2 to 4 students.
• Monday 25 April (or before) you must register your project in the project base.
• Monday 2 May, lectures 0900-1200 in Aud 3 and exercises 1300-1600 in rooms 4A54 and 4A56:
  • (1a) Overview of differences between Java and the C#/.Net platform
    Exercises: Write, compile and execute some small programs.
    Goal: Get used to C# Express 2005 or Visual Studio 2005 (if using the Microsoft implementation), or Emacs or similar (if using the Mono implementation).
  • (1b) Main features of C# not in Java 1.4: Convenience syntax: properties, indexers, overloadable operators, user-definable conversions. Value types and structs. Machine model. Methods: virtual, non-virtual and explicit interface member implementation. Delegate types and anonymous delegate expressions. Typesafe enum types. Variable-arity methods.
    Exercises: Write small programs that use properties, indexers, overloadable operators, struct types, call-by-reference, delegates, enum types, and variable-arity methods.
    Goal: To master the use of these language features and understand the difference from Java 1.4 and 5.0.
  • (1c) Database access from C# with ODBC.

    Resources: Monday lecture slides and Monday exercise sheet and Database.cs.

• Tuesday 3 May lectures 0900-1200 in Aud 3 and exercises 1300-1600 in rooms 4A54 and 4A56:
  • (2a) Generic types and methods in C# 2.0 Generic classes, interfaces and struct types. Generic methods. Type parameters and type parameter constraints. Generic collection classes. The C5 generic collection library.
    Exercises: Write small programs that use and declare generic types and methods, and generic collection classes. Experiment with C# attributes.
    Goal: To master the use of these language features.
  • (2b) C# attributes.

    Resources: Tuesday lecture slides: generics and attributes; and Tuesday exercise sheet.

• Wednesday 4 May lectures 0900-1100 in Aud 3 and exercises 1300-1500 in rooms 4A54 and 4A56:
  • (3) Other new features in C# 2.0. Convenient definitions of enumerators (the yield statement). Anonymous methods. Nullable value types. Partial type declarations.
    Exercises: Write small programs that declare enumerators and use anonymous methods.
    Goal: To master the use of these language features and get a taste of a high-level (here, lazy functional) programming style in C#.

    Resources: Wednesday lecture slides; examples Theatre.cs and Sheet.cs; and Wednesday exercise sheet.

• Wednesday 4 May to Friday 27 May project work and report writing.
• Friday 27 May before 1500: project hand-in.
• Between Monday 20 June and Thursday 30 June: oral project presentation and examination.

Teachers

• Peter Sestoft (sestoft@itu.dk), Department of Innovation: Lectures and project supervision.
• Dan Witzner Hansen (witzner@itu.dk), Department of Innovation: Exercises and project supervision.

Required literature

• Sestoft and Hansen: C# Precisely, MIT Press 2004. Get it in the ITU bookstore.
• .Net library documentation at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/default.aspx
• Kokholm and Sestoft: The C5 Generic Collection Library for C# and CLI. Draft manuscript, ITU 2005. Will be available electronically.
• Possibly further materials to be announced later.

Other information

• Some of you (especially the cinema booking projects) need to create a database. You can create a MySQL database at mysql.itu.dk using the ITU database self-service, found at http://itu.dk/sysadm/db/. Once you have created a database, you will get an email with instructions. To access the database from .Net, you'll a Mysql ODBC 3.51 Driver, available from http://www.mysql.com.
  The mysql.itu.dk databases apparently cannot be accessed from outside ITU. If you seriously need this ability, we can make a database at sql.dina.kvl.dk instead.
• The ITU course base project cluster description.
• A presentation of the project cluster given on 20 April 2005.

 1 lco@itu.dk              Lars Christian Olsen
 1 lynet@itu.dk            Rasmus Rasmussen
   Cinema booking system
   Supervisor: Dan

 2 muifa@itu.dk            Muhammad Iftikhar Akram
 2 stud3089@itu.dk         Naveed Anwar
   Spreadsheet implementation in C#
   Supervisor: Peter

 3 hkvisli@itu.dk          Harald Kvisli
   Processing orienteering race results
   Supervisor: Dan

 4 cwi@itu.dk              Christian Willumsen
 4 hlas0002@itu.dk         Christopher John Hlasny
 4 petern@itu.dk           Peter Nielsen
   Search engine with C#/.Net
   Supervisor: Peter

 5 eskeb@itu.dk            Jørgen Eske Runge Bentzen
 5 grishina@itu.dk         Julia Grishina
   Cinema booking system
   Supervisor: Dan

 6 itspri@itu.dk           Priyadarsini Seetharaman
 6 safuriatj@itu.dk        Safuriat Oloruntoyin Johnson
   Java Annotations and C# Attributes - a Comparison
   Supervisor: Peter

 7 mono@itu.dk             Morten Nordholt Andersen
 7 oksana@itu.dk           Oxana Babikova
 7 ulrich@itu.dk           Ulrich Haslund
 7 vecee04@itu.dk          Veronika Capskaja
   PortalCam
   Supervisor: Dan

 8 khabf04@itu.dk          Abdul Khader            
 8 ramoe03@itu.dk          Rakesh Moturi
   Spec# - A closer view
   Supervisor: Peter

 9 mlj@itu.dk              Magnus Lund Jacobsen 
 9 ykok@itu.dk             Morten Poulsen
   AntiSpy- og adware program detection
   Supervisor: Dan

10 hannesofie@itu.dk       Hanne Sofie Jensen
10 jmg@itu.dk              Jacob Grande
   Biograf bookingsystem 
   Supervisor: Peter

11 bademester@itu.dk       Thomas Kølle
11 boeuf@itu.dk            Martin Anders Victor Leboeuf
   Java annotations and C# attributes
   Supervisor: Peter

In addition, you are welcome to make your own project proposal. The project must have a substantial element of C# programming, including new C# 2.0 features.

Updated 17 April 14:03.

• A1. Compare the implementation of generic types and methods in C# 2.0 with generic types and methods in Java 5.0. This must include a non-trivial application of generic types or methods in C#, and a non-trivial use of wildcard type parameters in Java. For instance, implement a library of methods to work on ...
• A2. Compare attributes in C# with annotations in Java 5.0 (including Java's Annotation Processing Tool, APT). The project must include a non-trivial application of attributes in a C# program.
• A3. Movie threater seat reservation with graphical user interface and backed by relational database. A classical project from Java-based Introductory Programming.
• A4. Make a search engine project with C# 2.0. The original search engine project can be found at http://www.itu.dk/research/algorithms/Kurser/SoegeProjekt/2003DECEMBER/. You may use the collections data structures in System.Collections.Generic or the C5 collection library, but must then implement advanced features such as these (mostly taken from the search engine project):
  • Investigate how to easily support prefix-search. For example a search for "house*" will find all pages with "house", "houses", "houseboats" and so on. This only requires an extra table of words, ordered lexicographically.
  • Implement boolean search by supporting AND, OR etc. That is "Hans" AND "Grethe" returns the pages where "Hans" and "Grethe" occurs.
  • Find homepages that are similar to each other.
  • Let the user limit the search only to be at some given URL's, for example search for *.dk, eller it-c.dk/dkm/*
  • Support complex boolean searches, for instance (((a AND b) AND c) AND f OR b) OR g.
  • If a search has no result it mihgt be because the user has made a simple typo, in such a way that an "a" became an "s". In such cases you can choose to return pages, which contains words almost matching the word searched for. (Like Google's suggestion: `Did you mean banana?')
  • Support free text searches. That is give the opportunity to search on sentences. A strategy is to implement a freetext search as an AND boolean search. This limits the search to a small amount of pages which are then run through. Another approach is to calculate hasvalues for sentences instead of words. A third possibility is a more compact representation of the text. Instead of having the word repeated a certain number of times, you remember at which positions in the homepage the word occurs. Find your own favorite strategy.
• A5. Empirical study of collection library efficiency: Compare the performance of Niels Kokholm and Peter Sestoft's C5 library with Java 5.0 collection classes, with Peter Golde's PowerCollections, and with Microsoft's System.Collections.Generic. Design scalable test cases and test environments, and measure how time (and space) consumption grows with test case size. It is to be expected that C5 is slower than SCG by some constant factor because of the richer functionality. Also design test cases that cannot be conveniently expressed in C5 or SCG or PowerCollections or Java's generic collections. The resulting report could consider expressiveness, efficiency and convenience; or could focus on just one of these topics in the comparison.
• A6. Implement a spreadsheet in C# 2.0 with a graphical user interface. Project components: Design a model of cell contents (Number, Text, Formula), design a syntax for cell contents (constants, formulas), parse of cell contents, compute cell dependencies (and discover circularities), recompute cell contents in the right order, implement functions and operators.

• B1. Experiment with runtime code generation in C# 2.0 using System.Reflection.Emit or System.Reflection.Emit.DynamicMethod. For instance, implement algorithms for cryptography, string matching, regular expression matching, sparse matrix operations or similar. Then create versions of these that generate new bytecode at runtime. Prerequisite: Programming language course.
• B2. Write an interpreter for the Icon programming language in C# 2.0. Represent continuations by delegates, and use anonymous delegates to express continuations. Parse source code using the CoCo/R parser, for instance. Prerequisite: Programming language course.
• B3. Develop a library for lazy functional higher-order stream programming in C# 2.0 with iterator blocks (yield statement), delegate parameters and so on. Prerequisite: Functional programming.
• B4. Write an interval arithmetic package. An interval should be represented as a value type; overloaded operators should be used to define arithmetic operations on intervals. Simple interval arithmetic rule include:

  [x1,x2] + [y1,y2]	=	[x1+y1, x2+y2]
  [x1,x2] - [y1,y2]	=	[x1-y2, x2-y1]
  [x1,x2] * [y1,y2]	=	[min(x1*y1,x1*y2,x2*y1,x2*y2), max(x1*y1,x1*y2,x2*y1,x2*y2)]
  1 / [x1,x2]	=	[1/x2, 1/x1] provided x1 > 0 or x2 < 0
  [x1,x2] / [y1,y2]	=	[x1,x2] * (1 / [y1,y2])

  More information about interval arithmethics can be found at http://www.cs.utep.edu/interval-comp/main.html.

Registered participants

ako@itu.dk              Andreas Korsgaard
arb@itu.dk
arh@itu.dk
bademester@itu.dk
boeuf@itu.dk
cwi@itu.dk              Christian Willumsen
donaldnkamwe@itu.dk
eskeb@itu.dk            Jørgen Eske Runge Bentzen
grishina@itu.dk
hannesofie@itu.dk       Hanne Sofie Jensen
hlas0002@itu.dk         Chris
hkvisli@itu.dk
itspri@itu.dk
jama@itu.dk
jamil@itu.dk            Muhammad Jamil Chaudhary
jmg@itu.dk              Jacob Grande
junli@itu.dk
khabf04@itu.dk          Abdul Khader            
lco@itu.dk              Lars Christian Olsen
lynet@itu.dk            Rasmus Rasmussen
martinv@itu.dk
mlj@itu.dk
mono@itu.dk
muifa@itu.dk
narkumch@itu.dk
oksana@itu.dk
pcordero@itu.dk
petern@itu.dk           Peter Nielsen
ramoe03@itu.dk
rmdsouza@itu.dk
safuriatj@itu.dk
smo@itu.dk
stud3044@itu.dk
stud3089@itu.dk
ulrich@itu.dk
umarfar@itu.dk
vecee04@itu.dk
yinghui77@itu.dk
ykok@itu.dk             Morten Poulsen

Peter Sestoft (sestoft@dina.kvl.dk) 2005-04-04, 2005-04-29