CS109 Midterm Exam Topics

The CS109 exams are all open book and open notes.  This year we will try something different and you will be allowed to use a computer in the CS Lab (or our notebook) while working on your exam.  However, the exams are not open-neighbor!  You will have a variety of questions on the exam.  There will be a small number of short-answer questions.  There will be more questions where you will be asked to write some code.  I will also give you some existing code and your job will be to add on or complete it.  The topics that will be covered are listed below:

Overview of Computers

• Major components of a computer
  • Major components of the Computer
• How data is represented
  • Bits to store numbers, characters, images, instructions
• Concept of low level machine code
  • Opcode, operand
  • Programs written in machine code
• Difference between assembly code, machine code, high-level compiled code
• Concept of the virtual machine

.NET Framework

• What .NET is, relationship to Visual Basic .NET
• Difference from older languages that compile to directly executable code
• Advantages of the .NET framework

Computer Programming Overview

• What an algorithm is, why it is important
• Be able to design something using flowcharts or pseudocode

VB.NET Form Design

• Dragging controls onto a form
  • Textbox, Label, Listbox, Button, Checkbox, Radiobutton, Picturebox
• Setting properties of the control
  • Text, Items, Name, Size, Position, Colors, etc.
  • Adding text to a button, label, textbox
• Events
  • What an event is, e.g. MouseClick, ButtonClick, Form Load ...
  • How to add code in an event

Identifiers and Variables

• Valid/Invalid identifiers
• Data Types
  • Understand the concept of a data type
  • Know String, Integer, Double, Single  - when it is appropriate to use each
• Variables
  • What they are, how to define them using a Dim statement
  • Assigning values to variables, initialization
  • Shorthand notations for assignment, e.g. +=, *= ...
  • Scope of a variable declared at the subroutine level vs. a variable declared at the Class level

Expressions and Operations

• Basic operators of +, -, *, /, ^, mod
• String operations:  & for concatenation, length, substring
• Type casting
  • Issues in using CDbl, CInt, CStr
  • Reading from text boxes or InputBox
  • Outputting to text boxes, MessageBox, or console
• Boolean Expressions
  • =, <>, <, >, < = , > =
  • Combining with AND and OR and NOT to produce complex logical expressions to be used in if statements

Flow Control

• If-then statement along with if-then-else
  • Nested if-statements
• Select Case statement

Loops

• How to use while loops (be able to write code with one loop level, or a loop with an if-statement inside)

Miscellaneous

• Difference between Class/Module-level scope vs. Local scope of variables
• What option strict on does
• How to use the integrated debugger
• Breakpoints
• Stepping through a program
• Inspecting variables
• How to generate random numbers
• Know how to draw lines, circles, rectangles, a pixel and the graphics coordinate system
• Getting the coordinates of the mouse in a MouseClick event
• Understand the RGB color scheme and how to create a color