Advanced Placement CS using J# and .NET

Teach .NET: AP Computer Science using J#

[Training Notes] [Books & Tutorials ] [Curriculum] [Misc]

This site was developed to serve as a resource for AP Computer Science teachers using J# with Microsoft's .NET programming environment.

Training Notes: AP CS using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

[Note: The links below are a draft only of notes put together when the regular lecture notes were not available.]

Java Basics:
Background, Hello World in VS .NET, identifiers, variables, expressions, assignment, operators, output strings, console I/O, dialog I/O, Objects, Simple classes (parameters, overloading, constructors), debugging
Arrays & Data Structures :
Creating arrays, Typical uses, Searching & Sorting, ArrayList, Primitive types vs. Objects
GUIs and Object-Oriented Design:
Swing and. .NET Libraries, Winforms & Controls, Exception Handling, Inheritance, Interfaces
AP Marine Biology Simulation (MBS)
Overview, Architecture, design, focus on Core classes, Role-playing, Extending the MBS (new fish, environments, display), Testing

Books & Tutorials

Downloadable book CodeNotes for J# (2.47 MB pdf, stored as a .zip file).
Downloadable book Thinking in Java, 3rd Ed. by Bruce Eckel
Maria Litvin, Be Prepared for the AP Computer Science Exam in Java. April, 2003. ($15.95 at Amazon.com)
Site to accompany the Litvin book has links into the above College Board AP CS resources.
Popular CS1 Java Textbooks
- Walter Savitch, Absolute Java ($90 new, $44 used at Amazon). This book is my personal CS1 favorite, as it presents information intuitively.
- Nell Dale, A Laboratory Course in Java, ($37 new at Amazon).
- Horstmann, Big Java
Tutorials & Examples
- Sun's tutorial trail on learning the Java Language
- Extensive set of Java notes and examples from Fred Swartz
- CFX, a nice interface to a set of Java CS1 examples
- Tutorial from Bradley Kjell, Central Connecticut State University

High School AP Curriculum (portions password protected)

Java AP CS Curriculum provided by Pat Phillips using the Nell Dale "A Laboratory Course in Java" textbook. This includes lesson plans, activity guides, vocabulary lists, transparency masters, and tests.
Sample tests, worksheets and answers
Joe Hummel's 2004 Teach .NET AP CS curriculum directory
zip file (36 MB) of all the curriculum in the above sections
College Board AP Computer Science: A test information, AB test information (Both require free login.) These sites contain a description of the AP exam topics, the subset of Java required, reference material, sample exams, teaching resource material, including the Marine Biology Simulation (MBS) Case Study. See also Microsoft's version of the MBS, using .Net, or this local copy.
Joe Kmoch has a great set of quizzes and tests. See here for the password.
Role-playing is a helpful introduction to the complexity of the MBS. See the scripts (pdf) and overview (pdf)

Misc.

PowerPoint presentation on UIC, Jobs in CS, Jason Leigh's EVL presentation
QuickTopic discussion board
ASCII table
Teaching AP CS with the Marine Biology Case Study powerpoint presentation by Joe Kmoch, delivered at the Advanced Placement National Conference in Los Angeles , July 2003
Java 2 SDK (also called J2SE SDK). [Note that version 1.5 a.k.a Java 5 is now available.]
On the above-linked page (see what it looks like here), scroll down to the third horizontal blue bar, underneath the heading "Download J2SE v 1.4.2_03". Within that, select the link in the far right-hand column (SDK, not JRE) on the row labelled "Windows Offline Installation". After going through the license agreement page, you will get to the actual download page which looks like this. Select the Windows Offline Installation, Multi-language, which is about 48 Meg.
Free Java Integrated Development Environments (IDEs):
- BlueJ Designed for teaching Java
  http://www.bluej.org/ includes a link to download the latest version of BlueJ, version 1.3.5. (I had trouble with the 1.3.5 version because of my firewall. If this happens to you, then try the 1.3.0 version, which is the same as on the lab machines.) The Barnes and Kolling BlueJ book also includes the examples (601K .zip file) from that book. See a browsable local copy of these examples. If you are working on these examples in lab, you should save your files either to your desktop or to the network drive, since you are not allowed to save files on the C: drive.
  See this set of screen shots showing how to write a BlueJ program that gives output to a terminal window.
- Eclipse Professional development tool
- NetBeans Professinoal development tool
The default location for Visual Studio applications is in:
My Documents\Visual Studio Projects
Additional fish pictures (thanks to Pat Phillips)
Useful links (doc) for AP CS teachers from Pat Phillips
Joe Hummel's notes from Summer '03 .NET workshops
When running from the console window, one of the Microsoft PowerToys ("Open Command Window Here") allows you to open a command window in the current Windows Explorer directory. This saves having to manually traverse the directory tree to get to that position. If you do want to manually traverse the directory tree, you can use
dir /x
to show both long and standard DOS directory names.
ZoneAlarm 5.0 and Visual Studio problem:
For for those of you using ZoneAlarm as a personal firewall, do not upgrade to version 5.0, as it prevents you from being able to use ASP.NET. Version 4.5 still works fine. (I believe this problem goes away if using VS 2005 as opposed to 2003.)
If you install IIS after Visual Studio 2003, you can use the following commands from within a Visual Studio command window in order to register it properly (taken from this site):
        iisreset /stop
        net user ASPNET /delete
        aspnet_regiis -i
        iisreset /start
You may also need
        regsvr32 aspnet_isapi.dll