Lev Lazinskiy

R1D21 Sorting Algorithms in C#

Today I started the Algorithms and Data Structures in C# course on edX. I am having flash backs to the many late nights I spent staring at my awful Java code during my CS program trying to figure out how various sorting algorithms work.

So far this is definitely the most challenging course of the series. If you do one module per day its amazing how quickly they take you from “this is a variable” to “here is how to implement bubble sort”.

I switched from Visual Studio on Windows to Visual Studio Code for Mac. I figured that since my ultimate goal is to write an ASP.NET Core applications this seems like a logical time to let go of the crutches offered by Visual Studio and do things “the hard way”. VS Code is such a wonderful text editor. Specifically for C# the Intellisense extension and The C# Extensions extension makes development a breeze.

I’ve never really used a debugger, and I  kind of regret that because it would have saved me a lot of headache during my CS program. The debugger that is available in Visual Studio Code for Mac is really wonderful.

As an example, you can observe the state changes step by step while walking through a bubble sort algorithm to see the numbers moving around. It might take me slightly longer than one module per day to get through this course, but I am looking forward to refreshing my memory on both data structures and algorithms.