Overview

  • Attendance
  • Why You Should Try C#
  • PennWest Adoption of Git and VS Code

Attendance

  • Abu Shettima
  • Christian Messmer
  • Jonathan Buckel
  • Joshua Watson
  • Lavender Wilson
  • Matthew Williams
  • Paul Shriner
  • Zachary Teixido
  • Zullikha Hassan

Why You Should Try C#

Short History

  • Microsoft engineers wanted to develop more features for Java
    • They were denied, so they decided to make a new language
  • Originally named ‘cool’, renamed for copyright
  • Wanted more features to add onto the JRE (Java Runtime Environment)

.NET

  • Essentially the same as JRE
  • Currently up to .NET Core 8, .NET 4 in LTS (long-term support)

Why Should You Use It?

  • It’s a very general purpose OOP language
  • Supports implicitly typed variables (var keyword)
  • Has massive support for many libraries with package manager
  • Supports strong structure using namespaces
  • Much less verbose than Java
  • Has very good Intellisense (both made by Microsoft)

Examples

POJO (Plain Old Java Object)

namespace DTC.Model {
	public class User {
		// no need to implement getter and setter
		public String Username{get; set;}
		
		// ... other fields here
	}
}

PennWest Adoption of Git and VS Code

We discussed inviting several professors to a club meeting in order to convince them to advocate for teaching students how to use Git (and maybe GitHub or another online repo storage provider), as well as adopting VS Code (instead of Dev-C++) as the primary text editor that students use.

There are so many benefits of making these changes, and not implementing them keeps current students in the past in terms of what software/technology they’ll actually be using once they get a job.

Christian and Paul are going to be working together to amend the ‘Git’ and ‘Why Dev-C++ is Bad’ presentations to show to professors sometime in April, before the school board meeting.