My life's path and Infopath

Woohooo ! Finally, I get a chance to get back to my blog again. First things first, yes, our baby boy is finally out in the big, wide world. Its been close to two weeks now and that explains the lack of any activity in the blog (I can hear some of you go "yeah, right !"). We are so excited with the new arrival and everyday seems to be flying so soon with so much activity happening around us. Of course, needless to say, everything seems to be centered around the little guy now. Every evening, when I come home from work, my walk is very hurried because I cannot wait to see my son. As soon as I enter my home, I wash my hands and then pick him up if he is awake. He doesn't seem very excited now to see Daddy ! :-( But, I am guessing it will be soon. :-)

As I am typing this, I have the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 2 installation going on. Yesterday, I had installed SQL Server 2005 and it went through fine. Not that I am very paranoid about Microsoft installations, I know what to expect. I am very excited about these new technologies and am hoping to develop some really cool projects and setup code samples on my website.

A couple of days back, I had attended the local .NET users group meeting. This was my first attendance there and I was happy that I attended. The topic of discussion was Infopath, something that I have been playing around with lately. It is a fabulous tool if you want to do just feedback forms, surveys, procurement requests and routing. But, anything more than that, you might be pushing it. Let me explain why I say that. The product still needs more maturity in terms of handling even slightly complex situations. There are still lot of things that need improvement in the product like -

1. No support for direct database access to OLE DB based data stores like ORACLE. We have to go through a web service to connect to such data sources. Only SQL Server and Access are supported for direct database access currently.
2. Well, if you thought that was ok, listen to this. Direct database access is not supported with even SQL Server or Access if the database table in question contains any blob (text, image or binary) or long datatypes. The workaround for this is to pass such datatypes through a .NET dataset from or to a web service.
3. If you were thinking of using text boxes for collecting passwords or any pin numbers, you cannot do so because there is no password control !!! Inspite of having a decent variety of controls, a password control was not provided because Microsoft does not guarantee the security of collecting sensitive data through Infopath forms. A workaround will be use to use your own custom controls for such purposes. I have not tried that yet and hence, I cannot speak for that.
4. I wanted to see how I can tie Active Directory (AD) users into various roles within Infopath forms. Using such an approach, I will be able to hide or show certain portions of the form, filter results of my data etc. To support this, we have Roles within Infopath. I tested this and it works very well. However, there is a note on the Roles window which advises the user not to use Roles when sensitive data is treated ! The reason behind such a warning is that data is only hidden from the user's view even though it has already been downloaded to the form.
   

So, how are we supposed to handle roles and security then for sensitive data ? This is where I left my research but I can see a technical possibility by using a typical Users and Roles tables combination in the database and using such data to secure the data. The only thing that I was not able to figure out was how to pass the currently logged on user's user id to the web service which gets the data from the database. If this were possible, I can get only the data that is specific for the current user. I think that this is possible but I need to do some more reading. If you know how to do this, please post the solution here.

Overall, I was very happy with the way the product is positioned today. As I said, it will definitely be useful for a specific set of applications but not for a wide-range of solutions. I would like to read more about the product roadmap and see where Microsoft will be taking this.

Okay.....that will be good enough a post for today. I have to get back to some reading, diaper changing and of course, zzzzzzzzz......some good night's sleep. And yeah, the VS .NET 2005 installation was a piece of cake. No issues. Go Microsoft !