We have some consulting time available! We are primarily a consulting / training / mentoring / content development group. We took a bit of a hiatus to build Church Radius (church management software) but it has launched so we're available again. Our primary focus is Microsoft technologies including .NET, SQL Server, and related technologies. The past 2+ years we have done a lot of ASP.NET-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) work but our experience and skill set is certainly broader than that.

We have a few services available:

Consulting and Contract Development

Software development is not quite as easy as falling off a bike. We can help get it done right and on time. We can provide various levels of service from high-level guidance on architecture and design right down to pumping out the code.

Mentoring and Training

If you are more of a we-do-it-all-in-house type of development shop, that's great. We can help keep your development utility belt up-to-date with customized training and mentoring. We have a great mentoring program called On Tap - read more at http://www.ardentdev.com/OnTap/.

New Offering: Process Improvement / Project Governance / Crisis Intervention

Ron Smith, a PMI-certified project manager with experience in crisis project intervention, is now offering help to companies with struggling projects or looking to optimize their process. Here's a breakdown of what Ron's doing:

Why is it that a horror story project gets so out of control before management knows about it? Projects gone bad are expensive to fix and they destroy morale, causing high staff turnover and re-training costs. And then there's the damage to your company's reputation in the eyes of the customer. Well-run projects have clear escalation paths and good communication up and down the ladder. If that doesn't sound like your company or project, keep reading.

Ron has helped dozens of troubled projects for companies of all sizes. He can help your team make simplified plans to tackle complex situations and start dealing with issues one at a time. A finely tuned team can overcome drastic changes in scope or direction and overcome hurdles without breaking stride. And team members will be happier because the project no longer appears unmanageable.

Ron has run Root Cause Analysis and Problem Resolution for Fortune 500 companies. He has helped turn around projects with demoralized teams facing million dollar penalties.

If you find yourself constantly in firefighting mode and going from one tornado project to the next, call Ron.

We'd love to help out with your projects. Give me a shout at 1-877-672-3487 (ext. 111) or email me at derek@ardentdev.com to discuss.

Technorati : .net consulting, asp.net consulting, asp.net developer

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On Friday I did something new: I ordered a new battery for my laptop (it arrived today). I've never had a primary laptop long enough to get really bothered by reduced battery life. It's been more than 1.5 years since I got my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC and I still love it. In that time the battery life has gone from 3.5 to 4.5 hours to about 1 hour or so. I'm flying to LA next week and that trip is just too long to only have an hour of battery life.

TOSHIBA Portege M200 series Main battery

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In case you've missed all the noise about this, Microsoft is rebranding WinFX as .NET 3.0. More accurately, .NET 3.0 is .NET 2.0 plus WinFX, which includes WPF, WCF, WF (Workflow), and WCS (CardSpace, formerly InfoCard). Overall I think this is a great idea. There is bound to be some confusion given that .NET Framework 3.0 includes the same compilers and runtime from .NET Framework 2.0. But hopefully it will clear up the confusion that was building about the relationship between .NET 2.0 and WinFX.

The announcement came a few days ago (just before TechEd) from the corporate VP of the Developer Division of Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/06/09/624300.aspx.

At first glance I didn't think it was a great idea but I warmed to it quickly. Rumblings I've seen have been that this is not a big enough change to warrant a full version number jump but that's nonsense. WinFX encompasses a lot of new stuff in the form of managed APIs. .NET Framework 3.0 is really just the branded name of the distribution for marketing anyway - nothing changes technically.

Of course there will still be things to complain about. For example, if you ask me to build an ASP.NET 2.0 application, we have to then talk about whether we are targeting .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.0 so I know if I can use Indigo and Workflow.

Ultimately what is great about this change is that it positions the .NET Framework as the replacement brand for Win32 rather than WinFX. We all love .NET but WinFX is new and strange.

Some more info on naming versus versioning of .NET: http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2006/06/13/630066.aspx.

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churchradius was featured in an article at ITBusiness.ca:

Parishioner converts his church to software as a service model

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I have been waiting anxiously for this: Microsoft has announced Team System for Database Professionals. Among the coming features are:

• rename refactoring,
• a new T-SQL editor,
• a schema compare tool that will generate scripts to sync the schemas of two databases,
• a data compare tool that will generate scripts to sync the data in two databases, and
• a database unit testing infrastructure.

More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/dbpro/default.aspx

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I went to see Mission Impossible 3 last night with my (very) pregnant wife. I don't want to give away too much of the rather thin plot but rest assured that something really important hinged on a tech guy back at the office. A couple of security-related things really struck me:

1. The tech guy always has too much power. The tech guy says, "You know they're going to be recording this call." Ethan Hunt replies, "And you know that you can erase it."

2. The tech guy was willing to break the rules because of his history with Ethan Hunt. If Ethan Hunt was a hacker, it would be classic social engineering. And don't think social engineering within an organization is unlikely. Reports indicate that the majority of attacks come from within the organization.

Lessons to be learned from MI:3 are 1) only give tech guys the power/access they need and 2) have checks and balances to prevent abuse of power.

Reminds me of a story I heard recently from [name withheld to protect the innocent] about an organization where the developers were Domain Admins for the entire organization.

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The Mad Mexican appeared at DevTeach last week to hook up with his old tag team partner Johnny "The Pimp" Bristowe - aka, John Bristowe of Microsoft Canada. The Mad Mexican mistook John's WPF talk for a WWF talk... Check out the videos and pics: http://www.madmexican.net/.

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Our church software project, Church Radius, has gone live! We're pretty excited about it here. It is a web-based solution that we are offering with a software-as-a-service model. We are taking the SaaS approach to an area that can really reap the benefits of low upfront costs, pay for what you use, on-demand, access from anywhere, etc.

We're just getting off the ground so if you think this is interesting, we'd really appreciate links, reviews, comments, etc.

Just to give a bit of history, I have been connected to a church software product since 2000. I have been patiently waiting for the opportunity to really overhaul it. Originally I was thinking of a .NET-based P2P smart client but the P2P framework I envisioned was a bit too ambitious. And frankly the church software market for Mac and Linux is really underserved so a web-based solution seemed like a really good idea. The software-as-a-service approach lets us help churches avoid spending money on servers, new workstations, etc. in order to run Church Radius.

Since this is a tech-oriented blog, here are some implementation details: The site runs on ASP.NET 2.0. We built everything using Visual Studio 2005. We use ASP.NET Membership, which was a real boon because it was almost plug-and-play. We did a little bit to integrate our account management with the membership database but otherwise it was just so simple. And of course we are using master pages. You have to love master pages!

The backend is SQL Server 2005. The login account from the web site to database only has permission to execute stored procedures to remove the risk of SQL injection vulnerability slips. Because our church software is a hosted SaaS solution, we have multiple customers on the same servers. Every stored proc has to accept an OrgId and use it for every query (we monitor that part manually). Of course that lets you create a clustered index on OrgId for all tables to allow for efficient queries since each church represents only a small subset of the data in a table (so the execution plan is likely to use the clustered index).

We use NUnit for developer testing and NAnt for nightly builds on a dedicated build server. I also created a little web page that any developer can hit anytime to initiate a new build. I really should publish that to this blog one of these days. The NAnt script was a port from another project and is almost completely redundant now since basically all the build work is shelled out to MSBuild.

Right now I am working with Watir to do automated UI testing. Watir is a Ruby testing framework that automates IE. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, that's what we've been working on at Ardent lately: church software-as-a-service. Check it out and please spread the word!

Technorati : Christian, Christianity, Faith, Religion, SaaS, Software as a Service, Theology, church, church software

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DevTeach is just a week away...

Are you going to be there? Leave a comment. Still on the fence? My advice: just do it! DevTeach is a great conference, which is why I signed up to present there (a mere 2.5 weeks before my wife's due date - yikes!). It really is a great value and Montreal is such a great city. You won't regret it at all.

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Well, I'm a roll with bad error messages this month. This week we finally received a merchant number and API token from Moneris to accept Mastercard and Visa for Church Radius. So I plugged the numbers into our configuration file and went to process a live credit card transaction. It failed with an error message saying "API Token Mismatch". What might this error message make you think is wrong? That you had an invalid API token? Good guess... But, nope. We got that error message because the sales team at Moneris had screwed up and not enabled recurring billing (subscriptions) to our merchant account. Even the tech guy at Moneris was confused. We figured it out by guessing at things that could be wrong.

The good news is that Church Radius is now completely and officially LIVE! Wahoo.

Technorati : church, church management software, church software

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Error messages should be helpful. Bad error messages disrespect the user by saying, "something is wrong but I'm not going to tell you". I've made that point before.

Today I was treated to a paragraph-long error message explaining password complexity rules. The password that failed was this:

3"[cU8jlBe4vG}Zx{3^6@3

Look at this password with me. It's plenty long (22 char). It has numbers, uppercase characters, lowercase characters, and non-alphanumeric characters. It's a good random password. It was, in fact, randomly generated by Keith Browns's PasswordMinder.

I dissected the paragraph of error message to find buried in the middle this rule: must not have been changed within the last 1 day. Oh. The problem was not complexity but that my password had been reset yesterday. Here I was trying to be responsible by immediately changing my password after having it reset...

What really irks me is that the error condition is known specifically but the error message is generic. If the regular expression for password validation fails, tell me that the password is not complex enough. If I used the same password in the past, tell me that. If I cannot change my password today because it was changed yesterday, tell me THAT.

When the specific error condition is known, tell the user exactly what is wrong and whether or not it is his/her fault. That way he/she can act appropriately without resorting to detective work.

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I've been trying out Office 2007 for a few weeks to give the ribbon UI a chance. I'm a shortcut key fanatic and frig, frig, FRIG!!! I frequently use Paste Special to paste unformatted text. In shipping versions of Word I press Alt+E, S, Ctrl+End, Enter (I'm pretty fast at that combo). Eventually I get around to recording a macro and assigning it Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V. With the new ribbon interface I have to press Alt+E, C, V, S, Ctrl+End, Enter. Not too short for a "shortcut".

"Oh, Derek," you say. "Stop whining and go create a macro." Sure, OK. Wait a minute... How do I create a macro? There is no longer a Tools menu. No mention of macros on any of the tabs. Grrrr...

The solution? Go to File | Word Options. Select Views. Check Developer Tools. A new Developer tab now shows up providing access to macros and some other stuff (like XML schemas). Yeah, I know - exceedingly intuitive compared to Tools | Macro | Record New Macro.

Now, I'm not exactly a Word power user but I can hold my own, and I suspect I am not the only person who is not going to appreciate feeling like a novice in my word processor. I am convinced that ribbon-enabled Office 2007 products will ultimately ship with a compatibility mode (standard menus, toolbars, etc.). I personally won't use it, I'll fumble my way through figuring out the new UI. But lack of a compat mode will hinder adoption. Or maybe everyone has forgotten how essential it was to have a WordPerfect compatibility mode.

Update: Turns out the Developer tab is also how you edit document properties like Author and Title. I was wondering where that functionality went since it's not accessible under the File menu. Personally I think this feature should have been made more accessible, not less. Document properties can really matter when you start putting things into SharePoint or some other document management system.

Technorati : microsoft, office 12, office 2007

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