D520 – Week Five

Chapter 5 of IronPython in Action deals with XML, although it starts out covering some of the more advanced things you can do with functions.  I considered skipping this chapter (the function material is perhaps a bit advanced, and covering XML isn’t a necessity), but decided that it was worth learning about XML in .NET (since it’s so common) and that it would make using the MultiDoc example tricky (since the file format is XML) and I really wanted to use MultiDoc.  I gave the students notes [PDF], again covering the textbook material that we could look at, the tools (unchanged), key points, and a link to the MultiDoc example code.  We had a new lab exercise [PDF] this week (implementing Conway’s Game of Life), as well as two new recommended reading articles: a Lukas Mathis post about preferences and another Spolsky post, this one about “architecture astronauts”.