📘 Advanced Programming Techniques

My lab work for the course — a mix of experiments, broken stuff I fixed, and the “oh, that’s how it works” moments.

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✨ About this repo

Hey — this is my project folder for the Advanced Programming Techniques course. Inside are the labs I completed during the semester. I tried to keep each lab tidy and include notes on what I did and what I learned. This isn’t production code — it’s my learning log. If you read anything that looks messy, that’s probably where I learned the most.

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📚 Contents (Labs 1 → 5)

1. Lab 1 — Getting started & OOP basics
2. Lab 2 — LINQ
3. Lab 3 — Databases & EF Core
4. Lab 4 — Async / Concurrency & Testing
5. Lab 5 — Final integration / mini-project

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Lab 1 — Getting started & OOP basics

This was the warm-up lab. I set up the project, learned the repo / build flow, and practiced fundamentals:

• Project & environment setup (solution layout, folders, compile/run)
• Basic OOP practice: classes, constructors, inheritance, and overriding ToString()
• Small exercises to practice lists, loops, and simple I/O to the console
• Basic Git usage — init, add, commit, push (yep, I broke commits once and fixed it)

What I learned: how to set up a clean solution structure and why good naming matters. Also learned to commit often.

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Lab 2 — LINQ

This lab was a lot of fun — LINQ felt like writing SQL directly in C#. Tasks were done using both query and method syntax.

• Filter and transform number sets (e.g. select numbers > 80, order descending)
• Transform numbers into strings like "Have number #n"
• Work with people & city datasets:
  • Filter by height
  • Shorten names (John Doe → J. Doe)
  • Collect distinct allergies
  • Join people to cities and filter by population
  • Convert a list of people to XML using XElement

Snippet (example):

// method syntax example
var bigNumbers = numbers.Where(n => n > 80).OrderByDescending(n => n);
var transformed = bigNumbers.Select(n => $"Have number #{n}");

Files: Advanced ProgrammingTechniques 2Lab.pdf (lab instructions & my solutions)

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Lab 3 — Databases & EF Core

Here I set up EF Core with SQLite and modelled entities and relationships. This was very practical — I finally understood how ORMs map objects to the database.

• Created Student, Class, and Teacher entity classes
• Configured a DbContext and worked with migrations
• Implemented relationships:
  • One-to-one (Class ↔ Teacher)
  • One-to-many (Teacher ↔ Classes)
  • Many-to-many (Students ↔ Classes)
• Practice CRUD: add, query, remove, and re-query to see how FK constraints show up

Quick commands I used:

Install-Package Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite
Install-Package Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools
Add-Migration InitialCreate
Update-Database

Files: Advanced Programming Techniques Lab3.pdf (lab instructions & my solutions)

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Lab 4 — Async / Concurrency & Testing

This lab pushed me into thinking about time: async operations, tasks, and simple thread-safety. I also started (very) basic unit tests.

• Implemented short async methods using async/await to simulate I/O-bound workflows
• Explored Task vs threads and learned pitfalls (race conditions, shared state)
• Wrote a couple of unit tests (xUnit) for key methods to practice TDD basics
• Added small synchronization where needed (locks / thread-safe collections)

What I learned: async makes code cleaner but debugging async flows requires careful logging. Tests make refactoring safer.

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Lab 5 — Final integration / mini-project

The final lab was about bringing things together. I created a small integrated demo that uses LINQ to filter data and EF Core to persist results — plus a tiny console interface to play with the data.

• Connected previous lab pieces: data models + queries + persistence
• Implemented a tiny “seed + query” console flow so you can run the program multiple times without duplicating data
• Polished ToString() on entities so output is readable when printed
• Added short README notes and run instructions (this file)

What I learned: how small, consistent patterns (seed, save, show) make demos reliable and easy to test.

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🛠️ How to run (general)

Most labs are console apps. Here’s a general recipe:

dotnet build
dotnet run --project ./path/to/your/project

If you want to reset the SQLite DB used in Lab 3, delete the DB file (or clear the DbSet entries from code) and re-run migrations:

dotnet ef migrations add 
dotnet ef database update
// or delete the .db file and let EF recreate it if your code seeds data

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💬 Final notes (student voice)

This repo is me learning. There are bits that work, bits I broke, and bits I fixed at 2AM while wondering why the foreign key was null. If you’re browsing this, thanks for stopping by — and if anything here helps you, I’m glad I wrote it down.

— a student who learned a lot and still has TODOs in the code 😅