Teaching IronPython D520: Week 6

By Michael Foord -
Tony Andrew Meyer is teaching IronPython as course D520 ("Programming") at Northtec in New Zealand, using IronPython in Action as course material.

 He's been posting regular updates on how the course is going, including his course notes. We last covered weeks four and five and now we're onto week 6.
Chapter 6 of IronPython in Action covers “properties, dialogs, and Visual Studio”.  This seemed an obvious place to insert the material on user-interface design that is normally covered in the course, and to look a bit more deeply than the textbook does at Visual Studio itself (and the Windows Forms controls and their properties).  I only scheduled a single week to cover this, but I suspected that it might take more than one (I left an empty slot in the schedule to cover one such over-run), and that was, indeed, the case.  The students received notes [PDF], slightly longer this week (covering the UI design material not in the textbook, as well as the usual chapter summary, key points, and examples, and the steps required to install IronPython support in the ‘Experimental Hive’ Visual Studio SDK), and a fairly simple lab exercise. 
It's really interesting, and slightly scary, to see the work I put in on the book describing details like properties and the observer pattern actually being used to teach programming.

As often happens, real life has caught up on Tony's blogging. He is still putting the weekly notes together but has got a bit behind. He promises more notes coming soon.

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