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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
Five Universities To Enhance
Visual Studio .NET 2003 Academic
Microsoft Corp announced the winners of a worldwide request for proposal of
projects designed to enhance the Assignment Manager component of Microsoft
Visual Studio .NET 2003 Academic. Chosen from a field of 20 proposals from 17
universities around the world, the selected universities submitted projects
under the Visual Studio .NET Academic Tools Source Licensing Program, part of
Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative.
The Visual Studio .NET Academic Tools Source Licensing Program provides
access
to source code for Assignment Manager Server, Assignment Manager Faculty
Client and Assignment Manager Student Client. As part of the Shared Source
Initiative, the program enables developers to use, modify and redistribute the
licensed source code of the Assignment Manager for both commercial and
noncommercial purposes, including the creation and distribution of derivatives
for non-Windows(R)-based applications. Licensees also are free to use the
source code to develop, debug and support their own software tools for
integration with Visual Studio .NET.
"Microsoft is committed to empowering the academic community," said Morris
Sim, senior director of the Academic Developer Group in the Developer and
Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft. "We're encouraged by the strong
response to this RFP as the projects submitted extend the Assignment Manager
functionality and improve the student learning experience."
"We believe C# and Visual Studio .NET have the potential to become
excellent
language environments for introductory programming courses," said Zhong Shao,
professor of computer science at Yale University. "Our proposal to extend
Assignment Manager's functionality is a great step toward ensuring that Visual
Studio .NET scales to meet the needs of the largest introductory programming
classes."
"Legislation in the United Kingdom requires universities to archive
coursework
submitted by students for a minimum of five years, and the only sensible way
to handle such volume is to require submission in electronic format," said
David Grey, lecturer in the department of computer science at the University
of Hull. "We see Assignment Manager as a valuable tool to help accomplish
this, and our proposal seeks to make the functionality applicable to the
broader academic community."
The universities selected for this RFP include the Federal University of
Pernambuco (Brazil), Monash University (Australia), Universidade Estadual
Paulista Julio de Mesquita Filho (Brazil), University of Hull (United Kingdom)
and Yale University (United States). Their projects are as follows:
- Federal University of Pernambuco proposes to extend Assignment Manager
with
support for projects developed in the functional programming language Haskell,
including the extension of the Visual Studio .NET integrated development
environment (IDE) to support Haskell and adaptation of the Assignment Manager
source code.
- Monash University intends to develop a plug-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003
Academic that will permit the capture of various projects that a student user
can create. The plug-in will be designed to capture a project's content,
compilation progress and statistics on execution. The university also hopes to
combine the plug-in with Assignment Manager to construct reports a tutor could
consult to better understand a student's effort in developing programming
assignments.
- Universidade Estadual Paulista Julio de Mesquita Filho intends to
implement
a selection of enhancements for Assignment Manager, including the ability to
divide students into classes within a course; the ability of administrators,
faculty, teaching assistants and graders to access student information;
statistical analysis; and a tool that provides student access to information
on pending and previously submitted assignments.
- University of Hull plans to modify the Assignment Manager source code to
implement features that make the tool more useful to the broader academic
community, such as a generic electronic submission system to accept
non-programming course work, and the integration of additional tools developed
by the university to enable academics to obtain useful evaluation feedback on
practical work given to students.
- Yale University proposes to extend and adapt Assignment Manager to scale
to
large introductory programming courses with a grading tool for compilation,
project building, testing and reporting; support for grading GUI-based
programming assignments; and an assignment submission and checking tool.
Assignment Manager is a component of Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET 2003
Academic edition that enables faculty to simplify course management through
secure assignment submission, assignment tracking, automatic student project
building, student notification of grades and message transmission.
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