University and Microsoft | The Coffeehouse

cro

For my personel knowledge I'm following some corse at university. I was surprise that all teachers (for now) use Visual Studio and not Eclipse. One teacher even use managed C++. To me the best place to find OSS advocate was the university. But, most students are like Corona and Ubuntu, its Linux and noting else. and Microsoft is written with a $. I've brought my VS backpack to an exam one day, and I though that some student gonna puke on me (I exaggerate, but not much Big Smile ).

The university is even moving to Exchange 2007.

How it happens in your university?

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

My university has been using Exchange 2007 for all student mail since it came out, except for the CS department: we have full autonomy from the main university IT system and have our own IMAP (not Exchange) servers. We also have our own LDAP infrastructure: user accounts are imported at the start of the academic year but not kept in sync so we have separate passwords (but the same usernames) for CS and the rest of the university.

Of the CS student body... no-one has any real opinions on what we use either way, but we all agree that Netbeans is poo and Java's AWT and Swing are the works of the devil.

For the past several years the first-year CS students use the Linux labs with Netbeans and Eclipse, 2nd years get to use Windows and VS, and third years have free reign. We're getting some Macs in but they are expensive (but integrate nicely with our LDAP system).

MasterPie
I'm white because I smelt an onion

Bah...lucky. There's too much of an OSS culture here.

All teachers use either Eclipse or Netbeans. We have java as the mandatory language for the introductory courses, but everything else after that can be in any language. Mostly everyone sticks with java (and RoR if doing Information Systems) through graduation. A university requirement is that everyone (even the drama majors) learn how to use our linux file system. A teacher in my program constantly advocates against anything Microsoft. We use Cyrus for email.

Cool stuff...

Visual Studio IS installed on every Windows pc. Silverlight is installed on every Mac and PC and, get this..Moonlight is installed on the Linux machines.

magicalclick

In my El Camino College is was always VS C++ before it has the free VS Express. And in my UCI, it was Java and Eclips. But, I would go for .Net and C# anyday since I am on my own now. VBA:Excel for work since program coded on that doesn't need admin power on client machines, also it is really good with database integration stuff.

Bass
www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/

My university used Windows exclusively on the desktop (no Linux desktops at all), but pretty much all programming work was done on a Linux server you had to SSH into (via Putty). Some students would do their work on Visual Studio and forget to test it on the Linux server and if it failed to compile they would lose massive amounts of points for this (fail to compile is usually -30%, basically the highest grade you can get is a C on the assignment). The Windows computers had very little Microsoft software (they did have Visual Studio however, Microsoft provided it for free!), a lot of Unixy software (ie. Cygwin with most packages), and Firefox was enforced (no IE).

It was kind of weird if you ask me. I'm not sure why didn't just switch to Linux desktops completely. I think maybe the Sysadmins wouldn't have it. Smiley

spivonious

My school was filled with *nix professors but only about 10% of the students were hard-core Linuxfreaks. The rest were open to whatever worked the best for the problem at hand.

Erisan

Last time I visited in my University Linux had still a strong position there. Windows can be used by using dual-boot, but something like only 2% of the students seems to use Windows.

Most (90%) of the programming courses are still in C/C++. They teach programming and doesn't focus on IDE at all so basic text-editor is still used. I think that's 110% fine. Of course IDEs are installed so they can be used if the students wants to.

Polytechnics focuses on Java (Java EE) and C# here.

ManipUni
Proving QQ for 5 years!

Depended on the course at my Uni'. Some did Java. Some were using VS. When I left there was talk about a new C# course starting.

Duanerrr

When I was in college the intro course was in VB6. The next on was Java...before that it was PASCAL. There was also courses on Perl, Javascript, Adv. Java, MySQL, and C++. The computers were all XP machines. I had one course on linux and in that we would load / configure I think it was Fedora,

contextfree

It's been a long time since I took any courses (unfortunately) but in general I think universities ought to be biased somewhat in favor of FOSS as it's more concordant with academic values. I don't think education should just be about pragmatism or getting a job. But I don't think they should totally ignore or shut out popular proprietary software either.

Ubuntu

The best programmers and the brightest students on any year are Linux-only people. The rest of students who aren't that good end up running Windows on their machines (the majority). Does that mean that you need to be smart to use Linux - not at all - simply the people running Windows are not very interested in computer science (thus not that much concerned about what OS is running on their machines) despite the fact that they study computer science.

TommyCarlier
I want my scalps!

In reply to Ubuntu

#Jul 9th @ 1:19 PM

:-O

I'm smart. I'm interested in CS. I use Windows. Now what?

CreamFilling512

In reply to Ubuntu

#Jul 9th @ 1:19 PM

You know there's really only two significant operating systems out there, VMS (Windows) and Unix (OSX, Linux, most everything else). Windows would make a far more interesting OS study given a lot of the radical design choices that were made for NT back in the late 80s. Unix is more of a history lesson in how operating systems were designed back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

AndyC

In reply to Ubuntu

#Jul 9th @ 1:19 PM

I work in a CS department and I can assure you that couldn't be further from the truth. There are a least as many complete idiots running linux (mostly because they think it makes them seem knowledgable) as there are idiots running Windows. What's actually more amusing is to hear the attitudes of the die-hard Linux lovers after they've left uni and spent a few years out in the real world. Reality has a tendency to shift peoples perception of what is really important.

Ubuntu

In reply to AndyC

#Jul 9th @ 3:21 PM

Reality has a tendency to shift peoples perception of what is really important.

You mean people like Raymond Chen who were UNIX hackers who sold out to MSFT. When somebody is smart there is no justification to sell out like that. It's like in case of some talented musician - if he's selling out he's not doing it to make a living - he's doing it because he's greedy and he compromises the quality of his work in order to make more money. Luckily for some people money isn't everything. I don't have any respect for M$ sellouts who take the opportunity to leach on the rest of the world by sucking Satan's c0ck.

magicalclick

In reply to Ubuntu

#Jul 9th @ 1:19 PM

I am sure you are just trolling since there is no logic in your post. I am sure you know your post is rubbish. I am also sure you are just an attention * trying to get notice with all the blame baits. But, ............... I don't know.............. are you truly happy? Good thing I am not an Ubuntu fan, otherwise I would be really feel sad that peoeple like you making a bad name for Ubuntu users.

LinWinOverlord

In reply to Ubuntu

#Jul 9th @ 1:19 PM

I'm going into Software Engineering, and while the university mandates that I use Windows Vista Ultimate or higher, Office 2007 or higher, and Visual Studio, I'm gonna make damn sure that my stuff works all around, even if I have to sneak around my teacher to do it! Wink

Nevertheless, Microsoft's Visual Studio is an awesome suite for developers of software. I just wish it wasn't Windows only. Same goes for Microsoft Office really. I'm a pragmatist, not a zealot. But I'm also a very poor pragmatist. My primary machines to work on are Skuld (my one year old laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate, and now Windows 7 RC through VHD native boot), and Yggdrasil (my four year old desktop running Windows XP MCE 2005).

I'm trying to save up money to upgrade Yggdrasil so that it can run Windows 7 effectively, because I don't plan to do any of the heavy work on Skuld. I plan to do it on Yggdrasil, because Yggdrasil is much better at dealing with compiling code over Skuld, despite the fact that in its current state, running any Java or 3D application causes it to freeze up.

Cygwin is fairly useful, but it would be nice if Visual Studio could use the GCC toolkit for multi-target compiling similar to the .NET C# application compiling. Or better yet, the Visual Studio compilers would support a few of GCC's common targets.

Another computer, Urd, runs Fedora 11, which I use to compile and build packages for an open source project that I work on. Belldandy runs Fedora 11 as well, but it is only under default configuration, which means no build tools. It is strictly a testing machine and a backup laptop in the event I can't use Skuld.

I generally prefer Windows over Linux nowadays, but before Windows XP MCE, I used Linux primarily. With Windows Vista, I decided to skip the upgrade from XP to Vista because when I tried it out, it was absolutely horrible. Then last year, I bought Skuld because I really needed a new laptop, and Vista was still no better! With Windows 7, I was really pleased. I haven't been this pleased with Windows since Windows 95. The only thing that sucks is the pricing. But, I talked about that in another thread.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to LinWinOverlord

#Jul 9th @ 11:18 PM

You can use GCC with VC with some MSBuild tricks, it can take a while to setup though.

contextfree

In reply to LinWinOverlord

#Jul 9th @ 11:18 PM

I don't really get how you could find Vista-as-of-mid-2008 to be "absolutely horrible" but be really pleased with W7? I run W7 RC at work (not my decision or one I would have made, but whatever) and Vista (and Ubuntu) on my personal laptop. I definitely do prefer W7 and am looking forward to receiving the release copy I preordered for my laptop, but there's not that much of a gap between them. It's not like I dread having to go back to Vista whenever I use my laptop. It's a lot of minor improvements that add up to an overall better experience, but not a vastly better experience. Maybe your Vista experience is being dragged down by bad drivers or something?

I think universities mandating use of particular proprietary software (unless it's specifically a class in that software) is really rotten, btw.