InnerWorkings Blogs

Yes, it’s true. Ron Jacobs has finally released the interview I did with him a while ago for his hugely popular ARCast and ARCast.TV.

My initial plan was to use this fantastic opportunity to help promoting the excellent ideas that Dan North has developed in the field of Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD).

It’s a great concept, I thought, and it must be shared among the community.

Well, that was the theory! As I started talking to Ron, I quickly realized that it is almost impossible to talk about BDD scenarios without first introducing the agile context on which we can apply these techniques.

The result? I ended up talking about some agile values and techniques that I have adopted over the years, and I honestly didn’t manage to even tackle the essence of BDD.

Forgive me Dan, but we really run out of time! Well, if anybody is still reading this post, please go to Dan’s site and get more info about his work, straight from the source.

By the way, have you noticed? I’m such a bad blogger, aren’t I? It’s really a bad sign when you forget the password of your own blog administration ;-)

Ron however, reminded me of how gratifying is to share and learn from each other.

So I declare this blog open again. Be patient, and you’ll soon see something which I hope you’ll find interesting.

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If you’ve been following InnerWorkings and our monthly content releases, you’ll know that this SQL Drill has been waiting in the wings for quite some time. I’ve seen it hovering around the latter part of our roadmap for many months like a nervous teenager about to MEET THE PARENTS for the first time. So SQL has finally brushed its hair, studied current affairs, and arrived at the door with an orchid corsage.

I know a good number of developers and customers will be happy to see this fresh-faced new arrival in the InnerWorkings catalog. Now why did we start with Transact-SQL in the first place? Well, let me quote MSDN for a moment: “Transact-SQL is central to the use of Microsoft SQL Server. All applications that communicate with SQL Server do so by sending Transact-SQL statements to the server, regardless of an application’s user interface.” So there! Don’t argue with the MSDN robot.

Our first Drill on Transact-SQL caters to C# developers (VB to follow soon) and it covers fundamental T-SQL activities such as making queries, sorting and filtering, and using table joins. It also delves into control-of-flow language and using functions to manipulate data. Does that not satisfy your curiosity? Let me tell you more about what InnerWorkings has packed into this 3 hour learning feast:

• Using the basic T-SQL statements SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE
• Sorting and filtering data using T-SQL
• Combining records from two tables
• Using different types of joins
• Changing the name of a result set column
• Performing a calculation on a set of values
• Returning a single value using an aggregate function
• Controlling the execution flow of T-SQL statements
• Using built-in string and system scalar functions

We assume that you’re already familiar with basic programming concepts, language syntax, and have a working knowledge of SQL and SQL Server (or general database fundamentals, at least). If that’s the case, what are you waiting for - visit our catalog to get started. First person to sign-up gets an orchid for taking our T-SQL Drill out on a date.

In the old tradition of walking before you run, the next item on the developer wish list is Advanced Transact-SQL. Stay tuned for further updates on that release soon.

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