EC512 – Enterprise
Client/Server Software
Spring 2025
Instructor
Prof. Thomas P. Skinner, Ph.D.
PHO 513
tom@bu.edu
Reference Materials
- Numerous online resources, especially the World
Wide Web Consortium (w3c.org).
- Visual Studio, .NET and ASP.NET (docs.microsoft.com
)- Slides and other material provided on the course
web site. See links on home page as well.
- Books of your choice if you need additional
resources.
Prerequisites
Students must be fully competent in an object oriented
programming language (C++, C#, or Java preferred). Familiarity with web
technologies such as HTML, scripting, XML, etc. is helpful. Programming
experience with a graphical user environment is also very desirable.
Senior or graduate student status is required or permission.
Course Goals
·
To explore and use cutting edge technology
for enterprise software development in the modern distributed environment
afforded by the World Wide Web (WWW).
·
To understand the implementation of these
technologies.
·
Integrate basic knowledge of computer
networks with software design.
·
Learn modern rapid application development
(RAD) techniques.
·
Develop experience in working with current
and developing standards, e.g., W3C
·
Gain an understanding of the issues of
interoperability, cross platform migration and backward compatibility.
Grading
- 40% Attendance
- 60% Programming assignments
Attendance
Attendance is an imperative for success in this course.
Much of the knowledge is gained through in class examples and discussion.
Attendance is required and constitutes 40 percent of your grade. You will receive 2 points for every class attended up to the 40 points. There are more than 20 possible classes allowing extra classes beyond the 20 necessary for a perfect attendance score. You will receive a 0.5 point bonus for every class attended beyond 20. Bonus points apply directly to your average and are not required for achieving a perfect 100 points for the course. They will instead be used to compensate for lost points elsewhere in the course.
Late Assignments
Late assignments will be accepted up to one week
after the original due date with a 50% penalty. Assignments will not be
accepted beyond one week late without extreme mitigating circumstances.
Should a situation arise you must contact me in advance and I will
decide if an extension is warranted.
There is no free late policy in this course.
Software
Visual Studio 2022 Community should be obtained directly from Microsoft using the instructions I will provide. This is the REQUIRED software for the course. There is no charge for this software.
The software must be run on the Windows OS. The MAC version of VS can't be used.
Cheating
Any form of copying of any part of another student’s
program or other source is plagiarism and will result in a grade of F. Students may
assist one another in understanding the concepts of the course. I urge
cooperation among students in helping each other with the concepts only. The line
is drawn at the program code. Program code must be an individual effort.
In addition to failing the course I will report all such academic misconduct
to the student conduct review board. The easiest way to guarantee you are
not crossing the line is to never look at anyone else’s code and do not
show your code to anyone else.
All assignments must be done individually. No working with other students is permitted.
Do not place code on public sites such as GitHub or other source controlsites. You do
not want to be involved in contributing to plagiarism. DO NOT SEEK OR LOOK AT ANY PRESENT OR FORMER STUDENT'S PROGRAMS ON SITES SUCH AS GITHUB.
If I find you have posted anything from this course on a public site I will
regard it as plagiarism.
Internet Use
The internet may be used with retrictions regarding plagiarism. If you copy anything it must be very limited. For example a coupe of lines of code from the Microsoft documentation site.
Anything copied must have a comment as to its source.
The use of generative AI such as ChatGPT is strictly prohibited. Don't even think of going there.
The use of any type of proxy to write your code is grounds for an F in the course
and perhaps even expulsion from the University.
Last semester my staff started using automated tools to detect plagiarism including the use of ChatGPT etc. If you cheat the odds
are very high you will be caught.
Course Web Site
This course has a web site. Lab assignments and other
material that is relevant to this course will be posted there. The web site
will also contain copies of all course overheads. These can be viewed and/or
printed as you prefer. The course web site is located at
http://tomcat.bu.edu/ec512. Visit this site on a regular basis.
I do not use Blackboard except for some notifications.
Some parts of the site are password protected and the password will given out in class.
Topics
This is a tentative list of topics. Not all topics will
necessarily be covered and some not listed may be added. This is not meant
to be a week by week listing but is the general order we will cover the
topics.
- Downloading and installing tools and resources
from the web.
- Using Visual Studio 2022 for HTML authoring
- HTML and CSS
- Review of basic TCP/IP networking
- HTTP, servers and other basic concepts
- Legacy server side technologies.
- .NET technology overview, ASP.NET.
- .NET (formerly .NET Core) and .NET Framework differences.
-
ASP.NET technologies (Web Forms, MVC, Razor etc.
- Important C# concepts
(probably will be left up to you to learn the majority)
- An introduction to the .NET class library
(brief).
- Web forms using ASP.NET and C#
- Web controls and user controls
- Database access with ADO.NET and Visual Studio
tools (including LINQ)
- Use of SQL Server
- Web applications, session state, dynamic content,
etc.
- AJAX
- Authentication, login and roles and other security topics