Advanced File Handling

I couldn't hand in the Snowfall Assignment due to a SOMA rescheduling and I did pretty bad on the quiz. On a positive note we started some Advanced File Handling today, the teacher showed us a neat modification to his album program where it allowed you to modify and remove the albums listed. We're getting our assignment tommorow and I think I'm gonna do a text editor that can change fonts and stuff.

Searching

So it turned out I couldn't finish the Snowfall assignment, I tried but things didn't sort properly and I ended up being too frustrated to trouble shoot the problems. We also started doing some searching. I learned about some of the basic searching techniques, the Sequential search (which was going from top to bottom searching for something),and the binary search (which required the data to be sorted but was much more efficient than the sequential search). We were also given an assignment and we were going to have a quiz soon.

The Sorting Assignment

So we got the assignment, turns out we have to calculate the Median of small groups of numbers by determining if the array is even or odd and then sorting it with one of the sort methods (Shell sort was recommended). Since I forgot how to do the Shell Sort (should have copied that code) I decided to use the Array.Sort() function which would automatically do a quick sort on whatever array was entered in it. We were given another sorting assignment to do over the weekend which involved sorting snowfall data.

Some Sorting

So we started sorting in class. First we did a quick runthrough of different sorts and their speed. I watched a cool movie last year that demonstrated different types of sorts but the most important ones we used were the Exchange Sort,The Bubble Sort,The Shell Sort, and the Quick Sort. The Quick Sort being so fast it doesn't even take a millisecond to do. We also were told that we would be getting an assignment to sort some data.

Object Oriented Programming

We started a new unit today, something called Object Oriented Programming. Apparently it involves breaking down larger programs into smaller, manageable pieces. We did some work with classes and structures (which are dumbed down version of classes).In unrelated news, the school Internet decided to go on strike and refuses to work half of the time. Hopefully this won't put the rest of the week at risk.

A Test

So I handed in the assignment, got a pretty decent mark. Then I found out we were doing a test the next day so I did some studying. The first three questions on the test were nice practice questions we did, but re-programming them took so long I didn't have time to start the challenge question. I'd hate to cut this post short but it was Thanksgiving Monday and we didn't have school.

The Assignment

I was sick on Thursday so I heard we were handed out an assignment concerning simulating a tennis game.I Haven't finished the program yet but it's a nice challenge. Today we did some work with generating random numbers without repitition, something I already understood pretty well thanks to my previous experience with Turing. The example NFL Football helmet program he showed us was a nice example of how to do it (The average was around $27 but I could have sworn I saw one total up at $44). Can't wait to find out what we're doing on Tuesday! Happy Thanksgiving!

Randomly Generated Numbers Eh?

We started doing some work on randomly generated numbers, doing some basic review with generating integers and decimals with a maximum and minum value using r.Next(max,min). Hopefully this unit will stay as easy as it started, I still can't wrap my head around the arrays we did last unit. The practice Shooting Gallery program we did was a nice test and I managed to finish it without much trouble.

Catching Up Episide Four:Return of the Blogger

Final post!

Yesterday we learned how to make some homemade input boxes without having to steal them from Visual Basic. I personally like the VB input boxes because they are so simple and creating an entire new form just to input data is a bit over kill. I'll be sticking to the VB input boxes unless we absolutely have to use them, they seem to be pretty efficient.Yesterday's homework with the error trapping character pressing was something I still don't get, I only managed to get half of my homework done because of how confusing it was. Hopefully in the future things will come a bit more naturally.

Today was great, we did some work with methods (or subroutines) which can be used to automate tasks that will be repeated multiple times. I was impressed at how simple they were to create and use and I hope to make good use of them through the rest of this course. Today's homework was pretty cool as well, I managed to get most of it done without a hitch but the Even Odd program gave me some trouble and even now still puzzles me. I think I found a work around for the remainder division question though because using the % as the division modifier I was able to do the entire method in a single line. We also took a look at problem solving, debugging (which I still can't do properly) and my nemesis. FLOW CHARTS. I still can't draw a proper flow chart but the teacher recommended we use FastDraw which made things alot easier.Hopefully we won't be doing too many of those...

Catching Up Episode 3:The Revenge of the Blog

B-B-BLOG BREAKER

Was finally able to log in as myself today! We learned about rational and boolean operators for a bit. Was slightly confusing at first but it was similar to other languages so I quickly got the hang of it. As proof I can tell you that "thisBlog!=thatBlog" where thisBlog=my blog and thatBlog=everyone else's blog out there. The Boolean operators were a bit of a new thing. In Turing if statements went something like if (a>=b and b>0) but in C# it's like if (a>=b && b>0) which is a bit odd considering that I never use that key at all.

Today's assignment was making a discount program and a hardware store problem which thankfully was a breeze thanks to my mastery of button placement and naming. The part which is kind of scary is the fact that this is review and the workload is already pretty huge. Looks like I'll have to step up my programming knowledge or I'm gonna be buried in homework by next week! The bonus two programming questions were pretty tough to code in C#, I still haven't memorised the common syntax but I managed to muscle through it.

Catching Up Episode 2:The Blog Wars

More blogging!

After the scare that was the first couple of days we started working on something that I actually could do (Although I still couldn't log into the system properly). We started working with data types which made me flash back to my Turing course. The data types in Turing were:Int for integers,real for real numbers and string for string variables. C# decided it was too cool to actually make sense with the real data type so the names in C# are:Int for integer,double for real numbers and string for string variables. We also learnt some basic math functions (such as x=y+z) and some more complicated ones like Math.Pow(x) for doing advanced math functions.

Apparently there was some sort of practice quiz or something along those lines but I couldn't take it because I still couldn't log in properly (although I got to impersonate as Shailen for a little bit). Our homework included a restaurant tax calculator and a practice exercise involving deciding which data type to use for example variables. I managed to breeze through this with my previous programming knowledge and I'm guessing the other students did too.

Some Catching Up to Do.

Looks like I have to blog for my programming course so let's get started!

I don't have much experience with this type of programming language since I studied Turing, I was extremely intimidated by the interface that C# provided! I wasn't able to log in today because I wasn't registered in the system but I had the chance to mess around with buttons and labels. It reminded me of using the interface in Visual Basic.I had no idea what a Windows form was before today but I learnt that it was sort of a window that could be decked out with buttons and labels and stuff. I also learnt some lessons on basic naming conventions such as naming text boxings txt, labels lbl, and buttons btn.

We didn't do a Hello World program off the bat but I was able to make my own using "MessageBox.Show("Hello World!"). I was pretty impressed how simple it was making a dialog box appear using only a single line of code but I guess I wasn't used to using such an advanced language. The syntax looks pretty complicated but I think I'm capable of mastering it. That's about it for today, I'll hopefully get around to posting another one soon.