Reflective programming is becoming popular due to the increasing set of dynamic services provided by execution environments like JVM and CLR. With custom attributes Microsoft introduced an extensible model of reflection for CLR: they can be used as additional decorations on element declarations. The same notion has been introduced in Java 1.5. The annotation model, both in Java and in C#, limits annotations to classes and class members. In this paper we describe C# a, an extension of the C# programming language, that allows programmers to annotate statements and code blocks and retrieve these annotations at run-time. We show how this extension can be reduced to the existing model. A set of operations on annotated code blocks to retrieve annotations and manipulate bytecode is introduced. We also discuss how to use C# to annotate programs giving hints on how to parallelize a sequential method and how it can be implemented by means of the abstractions provided by the run-time of the language. Finally, we show how our model for custom attributes has been realized.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

The C# programming language is rapidly gaining acceptance in the developer community [25]. Microsoft has “bet the ranch” with its billion plus dollar investments into the .NET platform and has made it clear that C# is the premier language for targeting .NET [16]. Companies like HP are investing millions to train consultants and push the .NET platform [20], and businesses around the world are starting to listen and buy into what the .NET platform can offer them [8].
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

This tutorial provides an introduction to coding for mobile devices using C# and Visual Studio. There are many topics to cover, so unfortunately we will not be able to go into much depth in the time available. However, feel free to contact any of the organisers after the tutorial if you have any questions. We are all postgraduate students who completed our undergraduate degrees in computing science at Glasgow, and we are happy to chat about your projects or anything else to do with software development.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Modern object-oriented programming languages like Java or C# support multithreaded programming. They allow several threads to run concurrently sharing objects on the heap in the same address space. Each thread has its own frame stack, program counter, local variables and registers. The languages have special syntactical constructs for synchronization. Java has a synchronized statement and synchronized methods, while C# has a lock statement and several attributes that can be applied to classes and methods to control their run-time synchronization behavior.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Concurrent programming is still challenging and difficult. “Since concurrency techniques have become indispensable for programmers who create highly available services and reactive applications, temporal dimensions of correctness introduced by concurrency, i.e., safety and liveness, are central concerns in any concurrent design and its implementation” [Lea 98]. And without expert guidance and concurrent design-pattern description, they’re expected to occasionally fail. Thus providing significant examples and paradigms for teaching good and correct style is of prime importance.

Learning concurrency paradigms is necessary but it is not sufficient. The choice of the run-time semantics must be known since it may introduce subtle design and programming errors. It is the aim of this paper to exemplify the importance of process queuing and awaking policies (whether processes are named threads or tasks) resulting from possible choices of the monitor concept implementation.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Microsoft has developed a language called C# (—see sharp“) that it claims will allow programmers to —quickly and easily build solutions“ for its new.NET platform [3]. The language has much in common with Java, particularly in those features emphasized in CS1 and CS2 courses. It also includes some of the desirable features of C++ that are missing from Java as well as some new features not available in either language. This paper explores the pros and cons of teaching CS1 and CS2 using C# instead of Java and concludes with a discussion of the author‘s plans for teaching such a course in the fall of 2002.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

For historical reasons, machine language is also known as assembly language. In the old days, each manufacturer provided a program called an assembler that would convert special words into individual machine instructions. Thus, you might write something really cryptic like MOV AX,CX. (That’s an actual Intel processor instruction, by the way.) The assembler would convert that instruction into a pattern of bits corresponding to a single machine instruction. Humans and computers have decided to meet somewhere in the middle. Programmers create their programs in a language that is not nearly as free as human speech but a lot more flexible and easy to use than machine language. The languages that occupy this middle ground — C#, for example — are called high-level computer languages. (High is a relative term here.)
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

“Commenting is a royal pain in the posterior” - “Comments are for weenies” - “I can understand my code quite well, thank you very much” - “Good code speaks for itself” - “No time for that, got to get that code out of the door”. Admit it, you have said some thing along these lines at least once during your coding career. Maybe you even now still are in this kind of frame of mind. Negative attitudes towards commenting may have several reasons:
Programmer’s hubris
Lazyness
No time left for documentation due to deadline constraints
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments