Pleasanton, CA - November 13, 2006 - We know that software teams in every organization have different learning needs. As an administrator or development manager, there are times when you need to modify the standard InnerWorkings offering to meet specific internal objectives. InnerWorkings is therefore delighted to announce new customization functionality that gives you the flexibility to tailor our products to support your specific .NET learning goals.

This major new functionality enables you to customize the developer learning experience as follows:

• create targeted Developer Programs unique to your company
• group Drills in your preferred sequence
• mask selected coding challenges from view

Custom Developer Programs
Our standard Developer Programs contain logical groupings of Drills in general categories such as Programming .NET Framework 3.0. With custom Developer Programs, you can create your own combinations containing any number of Drills from our catalog. You can also change the sequence of Drills displayed to match your team’s learning needs.

Custom Developer Programs give you the flexibility to merge Drills from different categories so you can target the learning needs of particular internal audiences. For example, you could combine specific Drills from the .NET Framework 3.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 Web Development programs into a mandatory prerequisite program for new hires. Your custom Developer Programs will look and behave just like default InnerWorkings Developer programs and they are accessible only to developers within your organization.

Masking Functionality
With the new masking functionality, you can control the learning material presented to developers within your organization. It’s possible to hide any custom or standard Developer Program from your developers. You can also hide specific Drills and tasks if necessary. For example, you could use this feature to mask any non-essential .NET Drills or tasks from your development team so they can focus on the essential learning material.

Availability & Access
These new customization features are included in the InnerWorkings Platform 3.4 release scheduled for Saturday, November 18th, 2006. Developers in your organization will access custom Developer Programs through a simple auto-update process when they next login to the InnerWorkings Developer Interface.

Coming Soon
Further customization capabilities will be made available in the coming months. Clients will be able to create custom links to any web-hosted information, such as the company intranet and documents on internal coding conventions, directly within the Developer Interface. Detailed descriptions, including difficulty ratings and prerequisite information, will also be added to each InnerWorkings Drill within the Developer Interface. Customers will receive notice of these additional features two weeks prior to release.

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I came across behaviour-driven development (BDD) early this year at the software architecture workshop in Cortina.
When Dan North started illustrating the concept and his findings, I almost immediately felt that he was on to something with incredible potential; so much in fact, that I definitely consider that session the highlight of the entire workshop.

On the surface, BDD can be described as a simple refinement of test-driven development (TDD).

After practicing TDD for a while, it is easy to realize that test-driven development is more about code design (specification) than testing (validation).
In fact, it is about expressing the behavioural intent of the systems we are developing.

As a consequence, BDD is a practice that, at its core, advocates modifying the nomenclature of our tests to better support this mindset.

There is a lot more to it of course, but since I still have to prepare my luggage and I risk to be late for my flight to Barcelona (yep, I’m going to Tech-Ed Developers!) I won’t go into any detail today.
I will write about it very soon, however, as I’ve been trying it for a while and I think it is only fair to share my experience.

In the meantime, I strongly suggest reading the excellent article that Dan published for Better Software magazine last March and that now is finally available online.

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I have to confess that I cheated before writing this post by researching “Ajax” with my good friend Wikipedia. It’s been quite a while since I’ve read the Iliad cover to cover (ahem), but I uncovered some interesting snippets about the life of Ajax the Great:

• he is described as of great stature and colossal frame
• he commands his army wielding a great axe
• he carries a huge shield made of seven ox-hides with a layer of bronze
• he is not wounded in any of the battles described in the Iliad
• he embodies the virtues of hard work and perseverance
• he left a gigantic skeleton, its kneecap 5 inches in diameter

How much do you think Ajax’s shield or kneecap would fetch on eBay today? At any rate, given the heroic stature of this legendary Greek warrior, I thought it might be tough to work up genuine enthusiasm for more mundane matters like ASP.NET AJAX. However, its popularity is legendary and I’ve seen far to many stunning Ajax-enabled web applications and cool mash-up demos to ignore this humble technology any longer. It’s true that “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML” doesn’t quite strike fear into Trojan hearts, but it is a really powerful way to create rich and responsive web applications that process many requests within the browser. I won’t miss those long round trips to the server, endless screen refreshes, or looping animated gifs while your web application waits for a response from some distant server…

The really good news that I wanted to share is that InnerWorkings released our first Drill on Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions today! We cover some very important AJAX controls such as UpdatePanel, ScriptManager, Timer, and
ScriptManagerProxy. High level learning objectives for the Drill are as follows - don’t forget that we ask you to learn ASP.NET AJAX by writing code and solving real problems in our sample web applications:

• Convert an existing ASP.NET web page to one with AJAX functionality
• Define regions of a web page whose contents are updated using background
  AJAX-style requests
• Enable partial page rendering in a Master/Content page scenario
• Refresh a region on an AJAX-enabled ASP.NET page at regular intervals, without
  the flicker normally associated with a postback
• Send AJAX requests to a web service and receive data back from that service
  to be interpreted on the client

Check out our Online Catalog for details on this latest release - of course, you will need to have the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2
installed to get started. The Drill on ASP.NET AJAX Extensions is our featured “Pick of the Month”, so you can get your hands on 2 hours of coding challenges, full code samples, online reference material, and our testing framework for only $24.95. That’s cheaper than a hardback copy of the Iliad, but we should all read Homer’s classic over Thanksgiving too…

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