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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