While reviewing the white paper that describes the recent Project 2007 Infrastructure Update in detail, I came upon some interesting information at the end of the document.

Before I start, I first want to thank and congratulate Microsoft on a job well done with the quality and quantity of documentation they’ve provided for this update. Compared to the sometimes-cryptic KB Articles that typically accompany hotfixes and updates, the Infrastructure Update’s documentation is outstanding.

That being said, I do have some concerns relating to the changes in Cost Resources, which are a new way in Project 2007 of accounting for costs associated with a project. Cost Resources are typically used to account for non-work costs such as travel expenses. The Infrastructure Update makes some significant changes to the way that Cost Resources function, and while I am a big fan of the idea of Cost Resources, I cannot help but be concerned by some of the caveats I’ve quoted below:

Within the Project Object Model, the Application object has a method, FieldNameToFieldConstant(), that returns a PjField constant for use by the various SetField() and GetField() methods throughout the object model. More information on the SetField Method (and other associated methods) can be found here.

Unfortunately, when using the PSI, there’s no quick way to lookup the Guid for a field. This can be a problem, since the various CustomFieldsRow objects (Task, Resource, Assignment, and Project) do not include the name of the custom field, only the UID (for an example, look at the ProjectCustomFieldsRow entity in the Project 2007 SDK).

Retrieving custom field information in the PSI is accomplished by using the CustomFields web service. The code below is a class that implements a method to retrieve the Guid of a custom field using the field’s name and entity type. I had to chop the code up a lot because of space constraints, so I apologize for the excessive line breaks. This code assumes that you’ve set up a Web Reference to the CustomFields web service named WebSvcCustomFields.

In our previous article, we discussed Permission Levels for Project Web Access sites. We talked about how they were too liberal for most organizations and how to change them.

Unfortunately for us, the fact of the matter is that any changes you make to the default permission levels (in PWA or in a PWS) are not permanent, since the two Membership Synchronization processes overwrite them.

The PSI Methods for these two processes (QueueSynchronizeMembershipForWssSite and SynchronizeMembershipForPwaAppRootSite) can be found in the WssInterop service, which resides at http://ServerName/ProjectServerInstanceName/_vti_bin/psi/WssInterop.asmx. As previously discussed, both of them will delete and recreate the permission levels (or roles, depending which part of what document/interface/article/SDK you read) whenever triggered either by you or by Project Server.