So I had this script that makes our dev and test environment and blahblah. In other words I needed to verify that what I had was good before starting the process and that checked if everything succeeded as it was supposed to after the script runs. Seems like what I needed were a bunch of tests. First to check no one tampered with the bits I needed to make this work and in the end see if the things I did worked.

I’m joining this month’s #tsql2sday blog party as Andy Yun (blog | Twitter) has asked speakers to provide advice to new presenters. I’ve been presenting technical content for several years, and I think it’s one of the best things I’ve done for my career. It’s forced me to learn new things, given me self-confidence, and launched my career. I feel every person could benefit by sharing what they know with others.

I’ve been bookmarking all of my online reading for the past 7 years and recently started thinking about using that dataset to dig into trends in my past reading and potentially build a model to start scoring content I haven’t read yet. Even though I have manual keywords for each entry, I decided to look into what I could get with unsupervised text classification techniques to balance out the fact that I had entered those labels over long periods of time.

You’re taking a break from the two week project and bump into Joe at the coffee machine. He’s a little frazzled and starts telling you about this little task he took on Monday that is kicking his butt. While he’s explaining you realize he might have missed a simpler answer, so you ask him if he tried it. He immediately gets angry, of course he tried it, what are you trying to say?

In a typical single-page application, type and validation logic is entered in the HTML view and we rely on our binding framework or a validation library to layer this behavior onto the form. There are trade-offs to this approach, which are mostly negative as you get into larger, longer-lived applications. When we embed validation rules and logic into the View, we’re mostly limited to UI Testing to validate them (the most costly layer of the testing pyramid).

After working with NCrunch building and running tests in the background for the last several years, it feels like something is broken when I have to wait for test results or push a button to start running them. JavaScript runners just didn’t feel like they provided the same level of development feedback, whether they were command-line runners with gulp tasks, plugins like Chutzpah, or dedicated runners like Karma. I’ve posted previously on both NCrunch and Karma, test runners that run .

I’ve used a number of test frameworks and runners over the years, but my first club out of the bag is still running a SpecRunner file in the browser, with all of the dev tools and console output I’m used to from normal debugging sessions. The painful bit has always been manually keeping the SpecRunner file up to date and forgetting every 3rd or 4th file. Having the SpecRunner is valuable, manually context switching to catch it up over and over is not.

I’ll be in Las Vegas October 24-28, 2016 for SQLintersection, part of the DEVintersection conference series! Why attend DEVintersection? It “brings your favorite Microsoft leaders, engineers and industry experts together to educate, network, and share their expertise with you. Just this year, ASP.NET Core, SQL Server 2016, Visual Studio 2015, Windows 10 and SharePoint 2016 launched. The new release of Windows Server is on the horizon and open source is becoming the norm.

I’m excited to cross the Mississippi River again this autumn to present at SQLSaturday #557 Minnesota 2016. First, I’ll be giving a full-day pre-conference session, “Get Started With SQL Server in Azure”, on Friday, September 30. Tickets are only $110, include lunch, and you’ll get to hear me talk about What you need to know about Azure networking before creating a single database The differences between the IaaS and PaaS offerings, and when to use each How to create, manage, and monitor IaaS SQL Server VMs How to create, manage, and monitor PaaS SQL Databases Every attendee will get a link to my GitHub repository with scripts to accomplish many of the tasks I talk about!

Before we know it, October will be upon us and it will be time for another SQL Saturday Minnesota! If you have not yet registered for this free day of training on Saturday October 1st, please visit the site and sign up now! Since no SQL Saturday Minnesota would be complete without a full slate of pre-cons, PASSMN and the organizers of SQL Saturday #557 are proud to announce the addition of four day long pre-cons to be held on Friday, September 30th from 9AM – 5PM.