ProjectDistributor 1.0.3 to be released this weekend
This weekend I'm going to make a new build of the ProjectDistributor application available for download from the site. This is a bit of a strange release in that it's not very polished. Let me explainÂ…
For this release I decided that I'd implement a "Permissions" feature whereby you can create Permission items which describe what access can be granted to a particular resource. I.e.: CanViewGroup, CanEditGroup, CanAddAnnouncement, etc. This provides much more granular handling of access rights than currently exists where you are only known as one of 3 things: Unauthenticated, Authenticated, Administrator.
The idea is that, once your permission is created that you can assign it to a Group and also to zero or more users. This allows you to "bundle" users into a permission and then control their access by adding the permission to groups. This means that you don't have the nightmare of maintaining the user to group relationship. For example, you might create a "Developer" permission and then add that permission to every group, then, when users come and go you can just maintain their relationship to that permission without having to go through every group adding or removing them.
This feature is fully implemented at the business layer but only partially implemented at the user interface layer. This is documented in the release notes.
My reason for releasing now is that it's probably going to be my last release for some time as I prepare ProjectDistributor for the Codewise feature which is coming in Whidbey Beta 2 timeframe. I'll post more information about how Codewise will be implemented in ProjectDistributor shortly.