Three till Seven » C-sharp

two new programming projects

Sarah — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:53:54 +0000

I’ve gone on a programming project binge today, coding first in C# on a project to add an enforceable Implements attribute to class members, then in PHP to write a Github application for Facebook. I’m interested in co-developing the Facebook app, too, and have emailed a few of my programmer friends at UK to see if they’d like to participate in coding, testing, or some other part. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll get you access to the project on Github.

the wily C# shuffle

Sarah — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:46:40 +0000

My programming languages professor is quite the wily one. For our last programming assignment in there, we’re to write a fraction class in both Java and Smalltalk, as part of our coverage of object-oriented languages. I asked if I could do C# and Smalltalk, since I really like C# and, darn it, everyone says they’re pretty much the same language. For my professor’s purposes, i.e. teaching us different OO styles, substituting C# in for Java should accomplish the same purpose. (“Accomplish the same purpose” sounds weird to me now, but “accomplish the same effect” did, too. Suggestions on rephrasing?) I sent him a list via email of all the reasons he should let me write it in C#, including:

The Ph. D. student we had as a substitute mentioned that my professor is his advisor, the student is doing C# stuff, and my professor is not all that familar with C#. This would give my professor more experience with it, and in a case where he already knows what the expected result of the program is.
The same Ph. D. student pointed out that if you know C++ and you know Java (which my professor certainly does), you can read C# fine.
You can use Mono in Linux to run C#–there’s no need to have .NET or use Windows. This point stems from the fact that my prof is a big Linux person and either dislikes Windows/Microsoft or perhaps just GUI interfaces… He has brought his laptop to class before to show code examples and he’s so hardcore that his window manager, fvwm2, doesn’t even have title bars on the windows, by his configuration, so to move a window you have to hold down some key combination and drag it with the mouse.
For our first program, he let me work in Ruby instead of Python. Ruby is to Python as C# is to Java.
Recently on StackOverflow, I was reading someone’s response about learning a new programming language, and I thought he had a good point. He said that if you already know Java, there’s not much point in learning C#, but instead perhaps learn ML or C because those are different kinds of languages. If this programming project is intended to teach us about object-oriented programming, then it doesn’t seem like it would matter whether we wrote in Java or C# because they’re so similar.

He told me in class he had been considering my request, but had decided that since I code in C# all day at work, it wouldn’t be helpful for me to write the assignment in C#, too, so I should do it in Java since I’ve barely worked in Java before. Then he went on to say that anyone else, however, that isn’t familiar with C# can use that over Java. My classmates started laughing and I had to say “Damnit, that’s not what I intended at all!” Grumble grumble.

C# and Visual Studio

Sarah — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:25:17 +0000

Yarr, so work at HP has been good; I’m enjoying my time there. I’ve worked from home a few times, which has been nice: there’s nothing quite like coding in your pajamas and getting paid for it. I’ve mainly been writing PL/SQL queries and programming in C#. I was apprehensive about the job to begin with because I knew I’d be working in Windows, and that’s unpleasant for me. It still is unpleasant, and I get pissed off at Windows at least a couple times a day. I get most annoyed when I want to do something simple, like right-click on a file or switch tabs in Firefox, and it sluuuuuuuugs along, sometimes even freezing the screen such that mouse cursor movements aren’t even shown. My response is always “really? it’s that hard to show me the right-click menu and be responsive about it?”. It’s a decently fast computer, and I know the thing would be snappy in Ubuntu.

Anyway, I digress; C# is actually a fun language. I got thrown into it because I needed to implement new features on an existing C# web service. I was reading about the lambda operator and predicates yesterday. It’s not as pretty, syntactically, as Ruby, but it’s still cool.

CSharp

List numbers = new List {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};

IEnumerable even = numbers.Where(curNum => curNum % 2 == 0);

Whereas in Ruby:

Ruby

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

even = numbers.select { |cur_num| cur_num % 2 == 0 }

I’ve been working in Visual Studio 2008 and overall I like the IDE. Intellisense is very convenient and VS’s debugger is great. However, that hasn’t stopped me from banging my head on simple-seeming problems, such as collapsing all method definitions and then expanding all regions as soon as a file is opened. I’ve posted a question on Stack Overflow about it, if you want to help out.