Object-oriented Programming (Winter Term 2011/12)

Lecturer	Dr. Carsten Gutwenger
Major	M.Sc. Automation & Robotics
Course Number	048014
Semester	First
Type / SWS / CP	Lab course / 3 SWS / 3 CP
Language	English

I will publish news about this course (e.g. new stuff on the web site etc.) in my Google+ stream, shared with a particular circle of mine. If you want to follow this stream, I need to add you to this circle (otherwise you cannot see these news in your stream). Just send me an email.

Location and Time

The course takes place in the Retina pool, room P1-101-108b (Otto-Hahn-Str. 8).

Group 1: Tuesday, 10:30-12:45
Group 2: Tuesday, 13:30-15:45

In both groups Orwa Nassour will also be there as a tutor to help you.

Final Exam

The final exam takes place on January 31. Here you will find all relevant information:

You are qualified for the final exam, if you have passed at least three exam sheets; no further registration is necessary (list of qualified students).

The final exam takes place in the Retina pool at the usual times for the lecture. There will be two groups (A 10:30-12:30 and B 13:30-15:30). For the first group we will have both pool rooms (108a and 108b), therefore some students of the second group will have to come to the morning session; see the group assignment.

The two groups will (of course) get different, but equally difficult exercises.
You will have to show a student ID and a passport, so we can check who you are.
You are only allowed to use the printed lecture slides (best print them 6 slides per page) and a pen. We will provide paper. No further material is allowed, in particular no hand-written notes, no solutions to assignment or exam sheets, or any other source code. No laptops, no mobile phones! Breaking these rules will be considered as cheating and result in failing the exam.
The exercises will be similar as the tasks in the assignment and exam sheets, but of course not as complex, and they will not require to write so much code (e.g. parts of the code will be given).

The results of the final exam (Jan 31) can be found in this list. It shows the points per exercise (max. 1 point), the total points, and if you passed (at least 2 points) or failed. 70.6% have passed the exam (60 out of 85).

Here are the solutions to the final exams:

Second Attempt

The second attempt took place on March 30, 14:00, in Otto-Hahn-Str. 14, room 104.

Qualified are all students who were qualified for the first attempt and failed or did not appear. The relevant topics are the same as for the first attempt.

The results of the second attempt (Mar 30) can be found in this list. It shows the points per exercise (max. 1 point), the total points, and if you passed (at least 2 points) or failed. 61.1% have passed the exam (11 out of 18).

Group Assignment

Group 1 (10:30-12:45)

H. Ahmed	S. Al-Rubaye	M. Alsayegh	D. Alshare	M. A. S. Alvi
T. C. Arslan	A. Asad	S. M. M. Azher	V. Bangalore Nagendra	B. Bilgin
P. Broujerdi	P. Dank	M. U. Ehsan	M. Elsharkawy	M. E. Er
A. A. Farook	Y. Fisiha	S. K. Gajjala	H. Harnal	M. E. M. Hassan
M. M. Ihsan	M. H. Iqbal	S. S. Kulkarni	N. Liu	H. Mahadevaiah
A. Martinez Garcia	M. K. Mehmood	T. Mehta	L. Migdadi	M. Mohammadi Parsa
Z. Nazir	M. Nejati	A. Oster	H. Patel	S. Patel
S. Qa´adan	M. A. Saeed	N. Schafer	S. Sutradhar	M. Taghavi
A. Tatulea Codrean	B. Tor	S. T. Turesay	S. Wan	C. Yildiz
C. You

Group 2 (13:30-15:45)

A. Ahmad Yousuf	R. Aymaz	P. R. Bhat	S. Damodaran	D. Desai
M. A. Galván Mendoza	S. Gopinathan Asari Sujatha	S. C. Govindasamy Ramamoorthy	V. Hariharan	A. Harur Manoharan
V. Indalkar	R. Ismail	D. H. Jani	P. Khobkhun	A. Krishnaswamy Rangarajan
W. Li	Y. Li	R. Marishettihally Basavarajappa	I. A. Marta	S. S. Mudda
M. K. Murugaiah	M. Nandakumar	K. Narayanan	Q. Navid	M. Noman
A. N. Patel	A. V. Patel	N. Patel	R. Patel	A. Pithadiya
K. Radhakrishnan	B. Raja	S. Sandhu	V. Selvantarajan	N. Shaik
P. Shen	S. Shete	M. R. Sukhadia	Y. Sun	S. Thennilapuram Subramanian
V. Thota	A. Ul Jabbar	V. Vora

Content

In this course, you will learn

the programming language C++,
the principles of object-oriented programming, and
using a programming environment (Visual Studio) for writing C++ programs.

Material

You will find here all the slides as well as assignment and exam sheets (including solutions for assignment sheets).

Lectures

No	Date	Topics	Slides	Source Code
1	Oct 11	Welcome and Organization	slides
		Creation of pool accounts
		“Hello World!” project		hello_world.cpp
2	Oct 18	Variables and Simple Control Structures	slides
		Variables and assignments
		Printing and reading data		reading_data.cpp
		if-else statements, while-loops		printing_numbers.cpp
3	Oct 25	Loops and Strings	slides
		do-while- and for-loops		sum_up.cpp
		break and continue
		C++ strings and the bool data type
		Output formatting with manipulators		formatting_output.cpp
4	Nov 08	Vectors and Scope	slides
		Floating point numbers		printing_floats.cpp
		Increment and decrement operators		pre_vs_post.cpp
		C++ vectors		vectors.cpp fib_vectors.cpp sort_vector.cpp
		Scope and lifetime of variables		nested_scope.cpp
5	Nov 15	File I/O and Maps	slides
		File I/O and characters		reading_file.cpp writing_file.cpp
		C++ maps		maps.cpp
		Type definitions, constants
		Types of integers and the sizeof operator		sizeof.cpp
6	Nov 22	Functions and References	slides
		Functions		power.cpp nested_calls.cpp flow_of_control.cpp
		References		swap.cpp print_vector.cpp
		switch statements		switch.cpp
7	Nov 29	Function Overloading	slides
		Type Conversion
		Comma Operator		comma.cpp
		Function overloading		overloading_max.cpp overloading_print.cpp
8	Dec 06	Custom Types	slides
		Structures
		Operator overloading		point.cpp
9	Dec 13	Access Control and Inheritance	slides
		public and private
		Inheritance		employee.cpp
		Class Hierarchies		hierarchy.cpp
10	Dec 20	Pointers and Polymorphism	slides
		Constructors, destructors and assignment
		Pointers
		Virtual and pure virtual functions		redefine.cpp virtual.cpp draw.cpp
11	Jan 10	Memory Management	slides
		Static and global variables		static.cpp global.cpp
		Static data members		static_data_members.cpp
		Dynamic memory allocation		slist.cpp
12	Jan 17	How to debug programs with Visual Studio	slides
13	Jan 24	Smart pointers and Function Objects	slides
		Smart pointers		unique_ptr.cpp shared_ptr.cpp
		Function objects		functor.cpp sort.cpp is_odd.cpp

For the topics we consider in the last two lectures, there was a voting on Google+.

Assignments

No	Date	Sheet	Additional Files and Solutions
1	Oct 18	sheet 01	solution_1_1.cpp solution_1_2.cpp solution_1_3.cpp solution_1_4.cpp solution_1_5.cpp
2	Oct 25	sheet 02	solution_2_1.cpp solution_2_2.cpp solution_2_3.cpp
3	Nov 08	sheet 03	solution_3_1.cpp solution_3_2.cpp solution_3_3.cpp solution_3_4.cpp
4	Nov 15	sheet 04	desiredsignal.txt measuredsignal.txt words.txt grades.txt
			solution_4_1.cpp solution_4_2.cpp solution_4_3.cpp solution_4_4.cpp
5	Nov 22	sheet 05	solution_5_1.cpp solution_5_2.cpp solution_5_3.cpp
6	Nov 29	sheet 06	solution_6_1.cpp solution_6_2.cpp solution_6_3.cpp solution_6_4.cpp
7	Dec 06	sheet 07	solution_7_1.cpp solution_7_2.cpp exercise_7_3.zip
8	Dec 13	sheet 08	solution_8_1.cpp solution_8_2.cpp
9	Dec 20	sheet 09	solution_9_1.cpp solution_9_2.cpp solution_9_3.cpp
10	Jan 10	sheet 10	solution_10_1.cpp solution_10_2.cpp solution_10_3.cpp
11	Jan 17	sheet 11
12	Jan 24	sheet 12

Exam Sheets

No	Date	Due	Sheet	Solutions
1	Oct 25	Nov 08	exam sheet 1
2	Nov 22	Nov 29	exam sheet 2
3	Dec 13	Dec 20	exam sheet 3	exam_3_1.cpp exam_3_2.cpp exam_3_3.cpp
4	Jan 17	Jan 24	exam sheet 4	exam_4_1.cpp exam_4_2.cpp exam_4_3.cpp

The current results of the exams (Jan 09).
You need 3 positive exams (≥ 3 in the last column) for being allowed to write the final exam.

Visual C++: Problems and Solutions

When using Visual Studio on the Retina pool computers, there are some problems occurring quite frequently. Here, I describe some of them along with solutions to fix them.

You did not choose "Visual C++ Development Settings" when starting Visual Studio for the first time

This might result in a setup of the development environment that is not the best for C++ projects. These settings affect many parts of the development environment, including window layout, menus, and shortcuts. In order to reset your current settings to the recommended “Visual C++ Development Settings”, proceed as follows (see also MSDN Help):

On the Tools menu, choose Import and Export Settings
In the dialog, click Import selected environment settings and then click Next.
You can then save your current settings, but that's not necessary.
Choose the “Visual C++ Development Settings” and proceed.

When you run your program from the Visual Studio environment, a strange warning concerning the path appears

This warning appears, when Visual Studio tries to set the current path to the directory in which your project lies. If this fails, this warning appears and the current path is set to some default (the Windows directory I guess). The program, however, is started and works fine. This warning message is annoying, but you only have a problem if, e.g, you want to load and store files and assume these files are located in your project directory (without using a full path name).

The source of this problem is that your home directory is mounted as a network share, and by default a path name starting with “//pool-server03.retina...” is used as the directory, in which your project directory is placed. You can simply fix this problem by changing this path name when you create a project. Use the drive letter R: which refers to your home directory, so use a path name that starts with R:\Visual Studio 2008\Projects.

When you start a program an error occurs since msvcr90d.dll could not be found

This error occurs occasionally, when you build your program in Debug configuration (which is the default). It does not occur in Release configuration.

The problem seems again be caused by the fact that home directories are mounted as network shares. A fix that seems to work is to disable incremental linking. You can do this as follows (see also MSDN Help):

Open the project's Property Pages dialog box.
Click the Linker folder.
Click the General property page.
Modify the Enable Incremental Linking property (set it to /INCREMENTAL:NO).

If you do this, you will get a warning when building your program which tells you that Edit and Continue is enabled but incremental linking is disabled. You can then switch off Edit and Continue as follows (see also MSDN Help):

On the Tools menu, click Options.
In the Options dialog box, open the Debugging node, and select the Edit and Continue category.
To disable, clear the check box.
Click OK.

Do I have to create a new project for every program / exercise?

When you work on an assignment / exam sheet, you have to write many little programs, so the question arises how to do this task with the least effort.

When you create a new project as explained in the first lecture, you actually will create a new solution with a new project. You can see all the items in the currently open solution with the solution explorer (showing an explorer-like tree-view). In fact you can have several projects (programs) within one solution, so there is no need to create a new solution for every little program. To add a new project to the currently open solution, proceed as follows (see also MSDN Help):

In Solution Explorer, right-click on the solution (root item of the tree) and select Add and New Project.
Proceed as usual for creating a new project (select project type and template, …)

Once you have several projects in a solution, you will realize that always one project is shown in bold face. This project is the program that will be started when you select Start or Start without Debugging from the menu. If you want to have a different project as start-up project, right click on the project and select Set as StartUp Project (see also MSDN Help).

You accidentally selected as project type Win32 Application

If you accidentally choose Win32 Application instead of Win32 Console Application as project type, you will get a compiler error about an undefined WinMain function. Instead of creating a whole new project, it suffices to change one linker option:

Open the project's Property Pages dialog box.
Click the Linker folder.
Click the System property page.
Modify the SubSystem property: set it to Console (/SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE)).

If you use both Debug and Release configurations, you have to change it for both configurations.

Interesting Google+ Posts

My posts on Google+ about this course are marked with #cgOOP. You must be logged in to see the posts.

Final Exam: Second attempt

Questions about the final exam

Topics for the last lectures

Overloaded input and output operators for a vector<int>: vector_in_out.cpp
This input operator allows to enter the elements of the vector separated by whitespace and terminated by pressing return; the output operator simply prints the elements separated by a space character.
See also Google+ post.

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