C# and .Net project cluster May 2006

News

• The presentation slide used at the project presentation day.
• There's a list of actual registered projects.
• There's a list of project proposals.
• Here's the description of the old May 2005 project cluster

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 version 2.0 features released with Visual Studio 2005. 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 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 an ambitious project, involving new or rarely used features, or a project with a serious 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.

• In April (date and time to be announced) we meet to select projects and form groups of 2 to 4 students.
• Monday 24 April (or before) you must register your project in the project base.
• Monday 1 May, lectures 0900-1130 in 2A14 and exercises 1230-1500 in room 2A52.
  • (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 2 May lectures 0900-1130 in 2A14 and exercises 1230-1500 in room 2A52.
  • (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 3 May lectures 0900-1100 in 2A14 and exercises 1230-1500 in room 2A52.
  • (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 3 May to Friday 26 May project work and report writing.
• Friday 26 May before 1500: project hand-in.
• Between Monday 19 June and Friday 30 June: oral project presentation and examination.

Teachers

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

Required literature

• Sestoft and Hansen: C# Precisely, MIT Press 2004. Get it in the ITU bookstore. There is a file of PDFs of all pages that have corrections for the second printing. Some corrections reflect changes in C# from beta 2 to the final November 2005 release, but most corrections are very minor.
• .Net library documentation at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/default.aspx
• Kokholm and Sestoft: The C5 Generic Collection Library for C# and CLI. IT University Technical Report ITU-TR-2006-76, January 2006.
• 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.

A:
Applikationsdesign af en lagdelt arkitektur med ASP.NET 2.0
Mikkel Byrsø Dan (decorus@itu.dk) 
Nils Kasper Emil Oldby (oldby@itu.dk) 

B:
Thin Client vs. Smart Client - anvendt på et udlejningssytem
Jesper Schulz (jesperschulz@itu.dk) 
Ole Bengt Berard (berard@itu.dk) 

C:
Cinema Ticket Reservation System
Sami Azam (samiazam@itu.dk) 
Ammar Abbas (ammar@itu.dk) 
Abid Hussain (pakistranger@itu.dk) 
Khadim Hussain Mengal (kmengal@itu.dk) 

D:
Domæne specfikt sprog for netværks kommunikation
Martin Frausing Kjeldsen (mfk@itu.dk) 

E:
Et C# regneark
Jacob Atzen (atzen@itu.dk) 

F:
Implementation af regneark
Claus Skoubølling Jørgensen (skoubolling@itu.dk) 
Jens Lind (luzker@itu.dk) 

G:
Generering af specialiserede collection libraries
Stephan Spangenberg (spangenberg@itu.dk) 
Rasmus Johansen (johansen@itu.dk) 

H:
Generator for specialized components in C5 library
Weiqing Hou (houweiqing1980@itu.dk) 
Kim Velling Frederiksen (kvf@itu.dk) 
Martin Vyuga (martinv@itu.dk) 

I:
DAN: Movie theater seat reservation system in C#
Waqar Ahmad (waqar786@itu.dk) 
Syed Imran Abrar Hussain (siah@itu.dk) 

J:
DAN: C# /.Net implementation of particle filter for eye tracking
Lars Pellarin (pellarin@itu.dk) 
Vedrana Andersen (vedrana@itu.dk) 

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.

• 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 and reflection in C# with annotations and reflection (or the Annotation Processing Tool) in Java 5.0 (including Java's Annotation Processing Tool, APT). The project must include a non-trivial application of attributes and reflection in a C# program. For instance, you may develop a tool that uses attributes or annotations to control the printing or displaying of an object.
• A3. Movie threater seat reservation with graphical user interface and backed by relational database. A classical project from Java-based Introductory Programming.
• A4. 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 (SCG). Design a test environment and scalable test cases, 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.
• A5. 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.
• A6. Computer Vision and Human Computer Interaction. Alternativs to  keyboards and the mouse are needed to enhance the experience when  playing games and for disabled people. Using cameras attatched to the  computer can be used to observe the users movements and gestures. This   information can then be transfered to commands that control the computer. For example recognition of where people are looking can be used to move the cursor to the point where the user is looking and in  this way the user controls the cursor movements on the screen.  
• A7. Sudoku: In this project you are to implement methods for generating and/or solving Sudoku puzzles. You should implement a simple user interface for entering number and methods for generating and solving Sudoku puzzeles of various difficulties.
• A8. The Virtual Bornholm Project.  In this project the students is to work within a project aimed at  developing interactive and virtual models of historical places in  Bornholm. These applications should for example be executed on PDA's and other mobile devices. Examples of student projects includes the use of image analysis and computer vision to automatic or semi  automatic reconstruction of 3D structures (buildings and historical sites) from one or more images, placing 3D virtual models into ímages (augmented reality) or using mobile devices to enhance the experience  for tourist visiting Bornholm. Booking systems similar to the biobooking project can also be considered.
• A9. The .Net framework and C# offers an extensive set of primitives to make multimedia systems such as games, networkin,  video interaction and sound.   Projects investigating and exploring these possibilities could be considered.

• 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. (A project along these lines was done very succesfully by Michael Schou Christensen in May 2005).
• 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 a program to perform pattern mining in C# programs. Very simple idea: Parse C# code to abstract syntax, abstract away from variable names, constants or other aspects of the code, then compute a "fingerprint" (a hashcode or checksum) for subtrees of the abstract syntax tree, and identify multiple code fragments that have identical fingerprint. These may be the result of simple code duplication, or maybe uses of the same code pattern. This project requires some prior knowledge about parse trees and abstract syntax, but freely available parsers for C# exist, so most of the project would focus on the patterns.
• B5. Write an interval arithmetic package. An interval should be represented as a struct 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.

• B6. Generation of specialized collection libraries. The C5 generic collection library is a comprehensive library for C#/.Net 2.0 that provides very rich functionality such as sublist views, update events. One drawback of this rich functionality is that user programs pay (in terms of memory requirements) also for advanced features that they do not use. The purpose of this project is to investigate the automatic generation/selection of only the relevant components (classes, methods and fields) for any particular use of the library, to minimize memory consumption and make the library as fast as possible.

Peter Sestoft (sestoft@dina.kvl.dk) 2006-04-29