Considering the rapid pace of changes in the software field and the limited courses that a student can take in languages, the question is which languages are crucial for students to learn in an undergraduate IS curriculum. This paper investigates the necessity of teaching C# and .NET in the undergraduate IS curriculum. It explores the pros and cons of .Net versus J2EE for applications development and differences between C#, C++ and Java, and which one may be the best language for teaching first programming course in IS curriculum.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

The Java language has revolutionized the way we program applications for the Internet. Two great ideas make this language so promising:
• Applications written using Java run on multiple different platforms.
• Automatic memory management or garbage collection (GC) comes as a great relief for developers.
Other than these two issues, most of the remaining Java features can be implemented using the majority of other languages. Since its first public release in 1995, the Java language has been maturing and consolidating its position in the market as an increasing number of organizations realize its built-in strengths.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Most modern programming languages rely on exceptions for dealing with abnormal situations. Although exception handling was a significant improvement over other mechanisms like checking return codes, it is far from perfect. In fact, it can be argued that this mechanism is seriously limited, if not, flawed. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion by providing quantitative measures on how programmers are currently using exception handling. We examined 32 different applications, both for Java and .NET. The major conclusion for this work is that exceptions are not being correctly used as an error recovery mechanism. Exception handlers are not specialized enough for allowing recovery and, typically, programmers just do one of the following actions: logging, user notification and application termination. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive study done on exception handling to date, providing a quantitative measure useful for guiding the development of new error handling mechanisms.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

This paper explains our efforts to add Ada to Microsoft’s family of .NET languages. There are several advantages to weaving Ada into the Common Language Environment provided by the .NET environment. This paper explains our approach and current progress on the research. We provide the means to extract Ada specification files from Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) code and compile Ada programs into MSIL.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

One of the great benefits of using Oracle products is their support for multiple programming frameworks. By supporting .NET, Java/J2EE, PHP, and C/C++ applications, all developers can use Oracle’s advanced database features, providing true flexibility for development organizations. Each of Oracle’s data access drivers is designed to maximize performance of its respective framework and to enable access to the latest database features.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

In the late 1990’s many ERP companies caught the web browser wave, undertaking projects to leverage the Internet and browser technology and even to convert their software to “lite-client” or web “portal” architectures. Unfortunately for some, .NET came on the scene too soon after this major overhaul. When .NET appeared, some were too technically exhausted, or inflexible, or still basking in the glow of their new “Internet-based architectures” to recognize and embrace .NET. Other ERP software companies were and continue to be simply too busy struggling to stay solvent during the devastating one-two-three punch of Y2K, the recession of 2000, and 9/11. They lack the resources to consider the complete restructuring of their products that .NET warrants.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

In this paper we present experiences with the .NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET which we won in two big projects. Thereby we give hints for the practical use in .NET projects.
We designed and implemented two systems:
• A database maintenance system for the internet risk assessor “MIRA” for the Munich Re. Up to 10 developers were included and the project had a size of 8 man years.
• The core application of the real estate investment company Real I.S. of the Bayerische Landesbank Group. The system was build by a team of up to 14 developers in 20 man years.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Crystal Reports has enjoyed a long association with Microsoft and has shipped with Visual Basic (and subsequently Visual Studio) as the default report writer since 1993. Developers have traditionally had a love-hate relationship with Crystal Reports; they loved the functionality it provided and the free run-time license, but they hated having to upgrade to the latest version to get the features they required. Another complaint was that reports could not be created or modified programmatically; they could be created only through the user interface (UI) with either the developer UI with Visual Studio or the consumer UI with the Crystal Reports retail package.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments