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All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
Tabcon is an application designed as a teaching and learning aid for concurrent programming for the Tablet PC. We aim to allow the user to draw on the tablet as you would draw on the whiteboard for traditionally modeling concurrency and then use the model interactivly. This interactivity is largely done through a simulation system we have built which can show how locks affect a program, where deadlocks may occur, and other situations. The user can define the order of execution of code as well as attach model code to the important points.
This project is headed by Lin Qiu and funded by Microsoft External Research. The original concept of Dr. Qiu's can be seen here. For most of this semester I have been the only one working on the project but previously there have been several others including Ting Qian, Michael Johnson, Jesse Arens, and Matt Wioncek.
Our final goal for the project is for it to be used in Professor Doug Lea's concurrency course but as a trial run it will be used next semester in the software engineering course. We are currently conducting user testing and the intial responce is quite good. We are approaching our first beta release of the software so stay tuned for some updates soon including the video demo which Lin Qiu will be giving at WIPTI in the next couple of weeks and the initial beta bits.
As a result of working on this project, Microsoft funded myself and another Tablet PC programmers plane tickets and registration fees for the MEDC conference in Las Vegas this year. This was a great oppertunity to learn about the latest in mobile software and the industry trends surrounding it as well as to interact with and share our opinions with several people on the Tablet PC team at Microsoft. For more information on our trip read the article from SUNY Oswego Campus Update.