At the beginning of January I posted a Request for Ideas: Firebird in .NET Tutorial. First of all, thanks to all who contributed their ideas.

I'm currently working hard on the tutorial. The original idea was to write just a quick introduction but it seems there is a lot to tell... The weakest point of Firebird seems to be the lack of freely available documentation - so I decided to invest a little bit more time in the tutorial.

Structure

I have set the structure for the release 1.0 as follows:

1. Getting started (installation, management, tools, security)
2. Tables (creating, autoincrement fields, indexes, importing data)
3. Data types (including BLOB, GUID)
4. Executing commands (calling commands from .NET, SELECT, embedded SQL vs. stored procedures, DataSet)
5. Transactions (default transaction, isolation levels)
6. Stored procedures (executable/selectable, creating, calling, recommendations)
7. Character sets (Unicode, problems, recommendations)
8. Administration basics (securing the TCP/IP channel, backup, multiple instances)
9. Domains (where to use it, useful domains samples)
10. Typical tasks (basics of strings, basics of date/time, returning last autoincrement ID, affected row count...)
11. Performance (indexes, page size, stored procedures)
12. Database refactoring
13. Views
14. Triggers

• Executing commands
• Stored procedures
• Typical tasks

Future releases

These topics will be added later:

• Visual Studio .NET integration
• Embedded Firebird
• Specialities of Firebird and ASP.NET
• .NET Framework 2.0 specific issues
• Using Firebird in Mono
• Arrays
• Events
• Services API (backup and restore...)

Plan

No, it's not.

However, you can use this simple code:

ServiceController sc = new ServiceController("FirebirdGuardianDefaultInstance"); // or "FirebirdServerDefaultInstance" if you are not using Guardian

This is a very nice article about Firebird generators: Firebird Generator Guide

Show what a Generator is in Firebird and how and why to use it. This is the attempt to collect all relevant information about Generators in a single document - hope it works, too... Who should read it?

Read this article if you:

• are not familiar with the concept of Generators
• have questions on using them
• want to make an Integer column behave like an "AutoInc" field as found in other RDBMSs
• are looking for examples on how to use Generators for IDs or other tasks
• want to know the Firebird word for a "sequence" in Oracle ;-)

Table of contents:

Chapter 1: Generator basics

Chapter 2: Using Generators (in general)

Chapter 3: Using Generators to create unique row IDs

Chapter 4: Using Generators with IBObjects

Chapter 5: What else to do with Generators ( and why most of it won't work ;-)

Glossary

I've been promising the Firebird Tutorial for .NET for a long time.

Now there is a first "beta" version: http://www.firebirdtutorial.net/. I decided to start with the .NET 2.0 topics - a lot of interesting things happen around FirebirdClient 2.0 and there is not much documentation about it (unless you are a fan of mailing list browsing).

The tutorial is far from complete but I would like to point out some interesting topics:

• Firebird and Visual Studio .NET 2005 screenshot guides
• DbProviderFactory generic database access
• SqlDataSource and Firebird
• Storing connection string in web.config

I've just released my new open-source control: MenuPilot 1.0 - fine DHTML context menu with layout of Action Lists/Smart Tags (known from Visual Studio.NET 2005).

Check the live demo and see what it is and how it can help you.

Features

• Customizable hint icon.
• Customizable colors.
• Supports data binding.
• Supports menu item separators.
• Full Visual Studio .NET 2005 design-time support.
• Compiled for ASP.NET 2.0.
• Available for 3 inline ASP.NET controls: HyperLink, Label and Image.
• Menu items can have Title and Target specified.
• Menu items can execute javascript or go to URL.
• Includes fix for Internet Explorer z-index bug.
• Includes fix for Internet Explorer windowed controls z-index bug.

If you need to check whether certain record exists the usual way is to execute the following command and then check if the :idexists variable is greater than zero (this is an example from a stored procedure:

SELECT count(*) FROM company WHERE companyid = :id INTO :idexists;

But the right way to do this is to use EXISTS() function. If you use COUNT(*) Firebird will be looking for all item that fit the condition (i.e. companyid = :id).

If you use EXISTS() it will stop when it finds the first one - so it's much faster!