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

The emphasis should be on practical experience and recommendations. The following chapters will be the key ones:

• Executing commands
• Stored procedures
• Typical tasks

This release will be focused on the core knowledge, leaving some topics for the future releases.

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...)

Comment and suggestions are always welcome! Just add comments to this topic.

Plan

I want to publish a draft version by the end of February... Stay tuned!