Long story short, I\'m president of a programming club at my university. We\'re

Question

Long story short, I'm president of a programming club at my university. We're all 1st and 2nd year programming students. We have a project we're about to start working on (converting a console program to a gui program, in c#). Only two of us have any experience working with winforms and event driven programming in general.

We want to balance learning with production (getting the project finished) as most of us don't have time to commit to a full on, 40 hour a week project. Our adviser is trying to steer us in the direction of not using VS2010's winform designer, he's trying to make it a requirement that we code everything in a "notepad++" type environment.

So basically, I need to get some answers to a few questions that I'm having trouble researching, so when we discuss how to proceed later today and tomorrow, I'm armed with some actual knowledge.

(We are all, including the adviser, generally "new" to winforms,c#, and .net)

In "real world" situations with winforms, how frequent is it that the designer would not at all be used?

Are we (the club officers) right in our estimation that what we have figured at a 4-6 month project (using the designer) would double, if not triple coding everything without it?

What are the merits of not using the designer at all as a learning tool to "see how its done"?

Is it a valid learning opportunity if we use the designer, then look at the generated code to get more familiar with how our custom controls/event handlers should be done?

I'm currently at a bit of a loss, and thank you all for your responses.

(Also, if possible could you list your years in field, and degrees if you respond, our adviser is huge on only taking opinions from who he considers "qualified", thanks).

Edit -- Also take into account that learning is also one of our priorities, not just time constraints (We're trying to strike a balance between learning every single thing that we can, and having a project that needs so much time invested in it that it becomes unfeasible for us).

Explanation / Answer

Two things I noticed from the (engineer) schools I went to (and I did quite a few...) is that teachers all prefer open source stuff, and to use the most basic tools in general.

Now for the first matter, it's a question of budget, and it's irrelevant to the actual industrial world. Let's be honest, I've never seen a company make its employees code .NET with notepad(++).

For the second matter, I would agree to some extent, it teaches you how to code without coupling to a particular IDE.

As for the WPF debate, it is really not a good way to start .NET technologies, as I said in a comment, the learning curve may just kill your group (and you won't achieve anything in 4-6 months).

That said, VS2010 is the best IDE there is, and I thoroughly recommend it for your project: you can first abstract out a few things (like basic event handling as it's done automatically by the designer) and focus on implementing the easy parts of your project - gives you confidence.

Later on, you will need to make custom events, you will also need to make dynamic GUI features (adding tabs to a tabpanel for example) and then you can learn more about controls, and who knows? maybe some custom controls inheriting or not from windows controls.

Bottom line, the learning curve with VS2010 will be much smoother, and allow you to chose when you're ready for the next level, instead of starting from scratch and getting at the worst from the very start which can be discouraging.

And I'd add a particular note: if you go to an interview, and explain that you never used VS2010 but you have ".NET experience/background", your interviewer will have trouble retaining his laughter. Seriously, you would look bad.

As for the "degree" part, I have none, but I'm a professional anyway

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