Microsoft this week awarded grants to five
universities 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 Redmond, Wash.-based company Tuesday selected the universities
based on their submitted request for proposal (RFP) under the Visual Studio
.NET Academic Tools Source Licensing Program, part of Microsoft’s Shared
Source Initiative.
The universities selected 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).
The schools will be given 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 lets developers
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-based applications.
The 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.”
Assignment Manager is one part of Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET 2003
Academic edition that lets faculty simplify course management through secure
assignment submission, assignment tracking, automatic student project
building, student notification of grades and message transmission.
For its project, Yale University said it is looking 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.
“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.”
Likewise, the 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.
Project managers with Monash University said they want 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.
The Universidade Estadual Paulista Julio de Mesquita Filho said it
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.
Finally, the University of Hull said it 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 nonprogramming 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.
“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.”
With the latest round of universities under its wing, Microsoft said its
Shared Source initiative serves upwards of 650,000 developers through source
code access programs. Currently Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server
2003, Windows CE 3.0, Windows CE .NET, Microsoft Passport Manager and
components of Visual Studio .NET and of ASP.NET Starter Kits have source
code available through the Shared Source Initiative.
