Teaching Object-Oriented Programming Concepts Using Visual Basic .NET

Journal of Information Systems Education, Summer 2006 by Ritzhaupt, Albert Dieter, Zucker, Ron James

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an object-oriented approach to Visual Basic .NET instruction to be delivered in a traditional academic semester for information system curricula. The paper first discusses some of the inherent problems with Visual Basic .NET instruction and then proposes an object-oriented approach. This approach includes a systematic set of programming projects to take students on a journey that traces the principles of the object-oriented, the event-driven, and the procedural paradigms into a coherent framework. The Unified Modeling Language Class Diagram notation is used to model an object-oriented system that is developed and enhanced throughout the duration of the course. Practical recommendations and programming exercises are provided and evaluated in the discussion. This course is intended to be at minimum a second programming course for information system students to satisfy IS 2002 guidelines.

Keywords: Object-oriented programming, information system curricula, Visual Basic .NET

1. INTRODUCTION

For many years now information system faculty at both the Associate of Science and Bachelor level has made the decision to adopt the Visual Basic programming language into the curriculum. This decision ranges in reasons from its ease in the development of windows applications to its forgiving development environment - Visual Studio. Some institutions have even selected Visual Basic as the first programming language for students to learn in the curriculum. The Visual Basic programming language, however, has made a fundamental change with the debut of Visual Basic .NET from the previous versions - 6.0 and less. This presents some interesting problems for information system educators. Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) is now fully object-oriented rather than event-driven.

1.1 Problems in VB.NET Instruction

"Microsoft's .NET not only represents a major shift in the approach taken to software development and deployment, it also has the potential to change what is done in the college classroom" (Murray, 2003). The difficult process of integrating .NET into the college classroom has taken off in the past few years (Haiduk, 2002; Murray, 2003; Chaytor and Soleda, 2003). Some of the problems encountered are outlined in the subsequent discussion. Figure 1 capture the essence of these problems by showing the vast skills a VB.NET student must develop to proficiently utilize the language.

1) The .NET framework is a comprehensive application programmer interface providing services to many languages supported by the .NET platform. The services available are documented in the Microsoft Developers Network (Microsoft, 2005). At first glance, the MSDN can overwhelm the introductory student. However, the services provided by the framework are critical to the development of robust and reusable applications. The incorporation of the MSDN is therefore critical to instruction in VB.NET. Knowing which packages to include in the course can be a challenge for faculty that has not been properly exposed to the MSDN and a further challenge for students with limited software development experience.

2) Visual Basic texts are having trouble outgrowing their roots. The language originated as a non-object-oriented language, to which object facilities were added over time. VB.NET is a re-creation of the language, fully objectoriented, which incorporates the same syntax as Visual Basic as a subset. Yet many textbooks still seem to use the approach developed within earlier versions of the language: a combination of event-driven and procedural programming. In Bradley and Millspaugh's "Programming in Visual Basic .NET," 4th edition, object-oriented programming is given a cursoiy glance in the first chapter and covered separately in chapter 6 (Bradley, Millspaugh, 2003). Koneman's "Visual Basic .NET Programming for Business," covers many of the advanced topics, such as Collections (chapter 8), without first addressing object-oriented programming (chapter 9) (Koneman, 2003). Object-oriented programming is treated little and later in the texts as a separate thought rather than the cohesive glue that binds all the concepts together.

3) The fundamental principles of program design are based on a few similar ideas, yet the approach to developing a solution differs depending on the programming paradigm. Three programming paradigms have emerged as the superior approaches to program development: procedural, eventdriven, and object-oriented. Each paradigm exhibits unique characteristics that are important enough to differentiate the environments as three different worlds. The approach discussed in this section embraces an object-oriented software development perspective, while emphasizing the critical points of the other paradigms. As if teaching three different programming paradigms is not difficult enough, there is also a significant challenge associated with teaching active procedural and event-driven programmers the objectoriented paradigm because it requires a paradigm shift from long lasting procedural and event-driven principles and habits that are not acceptable practice in the object-oriented world (Turk, 1997).