D520 Week Three – 2010

Last year Chapter Four of IronPython in Action was covered over two weeks (the lab is also a two-part exercise), and I felt that worked fairly well, so kept the same plan for this year, although the exact parts that were covered each week changed.  As usual, the students received notes [PDF], and a lab exercise [PDF], and two recommended reading items, both by Brent Simmons: one on how improving quality is non-linear, and one on how your own code is always improving.  The notes again cover the textbook, key points, and example code (although most of the example code is MultiDoc, so just links to the online copy.

D520 Week Two – 2010

No radical changes from either last year’s week two or last week.  In a way, this is the real first week – in the previous week we learn about the course and about what IronPython is (and remember how to program in Python), but we don’t do much more than that.  In the second week, we really get into doing some actual IronPython programming.  I gave the students notes [PDF], and the first assessed lab exercise [PDF], and the recommended reading was two Joel Spolsky posts: one on (IT) customer service and one on how hardware improvements impact software design.  The notes are again in three sections: textbook chapters (this week is Chapter Three, a fairly essential introduction to .NET and IronPython), key points, and example code (from Chapter Three).  The lab is essentially the same as in previous years.

D520 – Week Six

Chapter 6 of IronPython in Action covers “properties, dialogs, and Visual Studio”.  This seemed an obvious place to insert the material on user-interface design that is normally covered in the course, and to look a bit more deeply than the textbook does at Visual Studio itself (and the Windows Forms controls and their properties).  I only scheduled a single week to cover this, but I suspected that it might take more than one (I left an empty slot in the schedule to cover one such over-run), and that was, indeed, the case.  The students received notes [PDF], slightly longer this week (covering the UI design material not in the textbook, as well as the usual chapter summary, key points, and examples, and the steps required to install IronPython support in the ‘Experimental Hive’ Visual Studio SDK), and a fairly simple lab exercise [PDF].

D520 – Week Four

This week continued from the previous one, covering Chapter 4 of IronPython in Action.  That meant no new notes, and no new lab exercise.  We basically did two things: worked through the MultiDoc example in Chapter 4, and worked on implementing the Airline lab designed in the previous week.

The first recommended reading for the week was Part 1 of Joel Spolsky’s “Talk at Yale”, wherein he tries to relate his study to his career – the part I hoped they would find interesting was the discussion of “geeks” versus “suits”.  The second recommended article was Steve Yegge’s “Code’s Worst Enemy”, which is mostly about code bloat.  In retrospect, these might not be the best pairing, since Yegge is always long, and this particular Spolsky article is very long (if you read all three parts).  However, I was again pleasantly surprised to hear that students were actually reading these.

D520 Week One

As promised, here’s my material from the first week of “D520: Programming” (in IronPython).  I gave the students a set of revision exercises [PDF] (and example answers [zip]), a course outline [PDF], and some brief notes [PDF].  The notes have four sections (this pattern will continue): which chapters of the textbook are covered this week (and a couple of sentences that summarise them or point out which parts are important to us), the tools that are required this week (since this is the first week, this section is large, covering installation of Adobe Reader, IronPython itself (including putting it on the PATH), and several IDEs (as previously covered), including configuration), key points, and example code (the examples that I plan to use in class).  For anyone interested (chiefly: me in about nine months time, when I’m planning the 2010 course), here’s a summary of the first week.  It’s rather long (2100+ words) – the summaries of future weeks should be shorter.