Re:Uhh... no (Score 1)

This reminds me of my intro to c++ course at a major research institution. They recently switched the intro course from Solaris/g++ to Windows/Visual C++/.NET. It's a total mess in a very similar way. In one of the first assignments students were required to make use of the math library, which turned into a mess when people passed ints and floats to functions that only accepted doubles. This worked just fine under VC++ but failed on the Solaris machines with g++ where all the grading is done.

Aside from this and other compatibility problems we've had between g++ and VSC++, the profs have no idea what they're doing with VS.NET because they've spent most of their time using the Solaris machines. I'm pretty sure the whole switch was motivated by the CS Department head, who switched Purdue over to M$ products when he worked there. So far he's only got the intro course, but they're looking at using it in higher courses too :(.