Friday, 13 October 2006

It has long irritated me that NTNU - The Norwegian University of Science and Technology - doesn't offer ANY courses on Microsoft Technology whatsoever, at least as far as I know. We're only learning Java and other stuff, and .NET and C# are lucky to be mentioned at the end of a sentence. The foremost university in the country should take a look at the figures for which technologies are really used by software companies today.

But, things are starting to change, but not exactly in the way I expected them to:

  1. It is not my department, the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDI) that is responsible for the change, but the Department of Engineering Design and Materials! The first .NET course at NTNU is not hosted by the computer science people, but by the engineering design and materials people! Come on, IDI, take the hint! Look outside your own little Java sandbox.
  2. Guess who is holding the lectures! It's Rune Zakariassen from Microsoft, me and a friend of mine, Gøran, from Microsoft Student Community NTNU. That's pretty cool!

The course is a preparation study for 5th year students starting on their diploma assignment, and consists of four seminars with lectures and hands-on labs. The first one was an introduction to .NET and C#. The second one, held this Wednesday was about Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and the two next ones will be about Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and real time communication. The idea behind the course is to give the students a superficial knowledge about these technologies so they can use them in their assignments.

The lectures were recorded on video. Here are the videos from the WCF lecture (in Norwegian, unfortunately):

Part 1: http://multimedie.adm.ntnu.no/mediasite/viewer/?peid=ac76f55b-9779-46d2-bc80-f789d3e1b469
Part 2: http://multimedie.adm.ntnu.no/mediasite/viewer/?peid=45f281b4-ae25-46d1-bfc9-d0d81ca6f140

Friday, 13 October 2006 15:19:05 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
> We're only learning Java and other stuff, and .NET and C# are > lucky to be mentioned at the end of a sentence.

Java and 'other stuff' aren't locked to the Microsoft platform. Now why would IDI wan't teach techologies that a large portion of their students can't participate in?

I'm sure you can learn the Microsoft platform at scools like NITH, but then again, they aren't the foremost university in norway.

I for one think the department of Engineering Design and Materials should take a hint The idea behind the course is to give the students a superficial knowledge about these technologies so they can use them infrom IDI :)
Dagur
Friday, 13 October 2006 15:20:55 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
err, some copypasta ended up in previous post, the last sentence should read

I for one think the department of Engineering Design and Materials should take a hint from IDI :)
Dagur
Friday, 13 October 2006 17:38:48 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
Thanks for commenting, proves that someone is actually reading this. I expected to get some critical comments on this one :-)

So, you're saying that things you code in C# and on the .NET platform are locked to the Microsoft platform? Then you should take a look at the Mono project (http://www.mono-project.com) and think again. Btw, did you know that C# is actually an ISO standard (http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=36768)?

You're correct in that the usual thing to do is to run .NET applications on the Windows platform and that .NET is probably not your first choice when you want to develop something that you're going to run on non-Microsoft platforms. But when you KNOW that your application is only going to run on Windows (possibly because the customer focuses on functionality and cost and not on platform), the situation becomes another one.

If you look at the latest surveys (I don't have any link here, unfortunately), you'll see that at least 50% of the decision makers in different software companies say that they will use .NET in their next project. That means that if you're studying at IDI, you have no oportunity to take courses on the technology that half the software companies are using.

I'm not saying that IDI should replace their Java course with a .NET course. But they could ADD a .NET course so that people who want to learn about the technology get the opportunity.
Hans Olav Norheim
Saturday, 14 October 2006 00:16:38 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
I've enjoyed reading your blog, even though I'm not very interested Microsoft technologies, as you so often blog about. :)

I do know about Mono, and I appreciate their effort, as much as I enjoy reading about their progress. The sad fact is though, that their implementation of Mono is far from complete [*]. Saying .NET was locked is probably an exaggeration on my part, but the alternative doesn't look too appealing to me.

Sun offers a full implementation of Java to every major operating system. I don't have to run an incomplete implementation such as GNU Classpath. I wouldn't like if IDI expected me to.

[*] http://mono.ximian.com/class-status/mono-HEAD-vs-fx-1-1/index.html

> But when you KNOW that your application is only going to run on Windows (possibly because the customer focuses on functionality and cost and not on platform), the situation becomes another one.

Sure, OK. I agree with you on this. But I for one KNOW that my application is ment to (also) run on GNU/Linux. Can I too get the same course, just with another tool that accomplishes the same job?

> I'm not saying that IDI should replace their Java course with a .NET course. But they could ADD a .NET course so that people who want to learn about the technology get the opportunity.

IDI doesn't teach Java courses. They teach programming courses. Java happened to be their prefered language in a couple of the courses for the time being. Java wasn't always their pick. It probably won't always be eather.

I don't see it as the universitie's job to teach the techologies that are in right now. They teach you programming. It's then up to yourself, and possibly your employer, to do the little extra work of introducing you to these technologies.

Dagur
Friday, 09 March 2007 22:50:03 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
You wouldn't use Java for enterprise applications anyway, it's too slow and crumby, you'd rather use C/C++ or Ada for microcontrollers that are common in the engineering industry.
Alex
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