October, 2011

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next releases of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities.  With ASP.NET 4.5 you’ll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC – as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post is the third of three posts in the series that talk about the new Model Binding support coming to Web Forms.  Model Binding is an extension of...

Sometimes people ask me for the slide deck to my PASS presentation . I send out the deck, but there is only one slide in there that is worth anything. This post summarizes the only useful slide in the entire deck. Let’s think about this question – why are tabular models necessary when we already have PowerPivot? After all, tabular models and PowerPivot models use the same engine and have the same capabilities for defining rich business logic in DAX. When is it necessary to migrate to tabular models...

Case sensitive, that is. Last year, Denny Lee posted about PowerPivot’s case insensitivity problem . Tabular models have the same insensitivity problem by default. As I mentioned in my previous post on language and collation settings , when creating a new tabular project, the collation used by default is picked by the engine for you based on the language setting provided by SQL Server Data Tools (BIDS). For example, if you are running ENU tools, new tabular model projects get a Latin1_General_CI_AS...

Collation and language settings are tricky; so tricky that my two planned blog posts on this topic can only scratch the surface of what goes on under the covers here. This post is a simplified overview of collation and language settings for Denali. In a future post I will show you an example of how to work with collations. There are two read-only properties on tabular models, Collation and Language, that give you a hint as to what the engine is thinking when it formats and sorts your data. For tabular...

I was doing some work on my Contoso HR Workflow Services sample application today when for some strange reason things were not working at all.  I found that when I tried to send a message to the Workflow Service from the ASP.NET code I got this exception. System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException was unhandled by user code   Message=The server did not provide a meaningful reply; this might be caused by a contract mismatch, a premature session shutdown or an internal server error. Setting...

When I was at PASS I fielded a bunch of questions about the BI semantic model, multidimensional (OLAP), and tabular (VertiPaq) models. I think there is some confusion about what the BI semantic model, multidimensional, and tabular models actually are, and when precisely you can use MDX and DAX with multidimensional and tabular models. Hopefully this post will clear up some of these issues. I will dive into the gory details and then provide a summary. If you are not interested in gory details, just...

Hi, today at my PASS session I gave a demo of a DAX Editor. This is a sample written by three testers on the Analysis Services team - Nick Medveditskov, Karen Aleksanyan, and Sergey Volegov. We will making this sample available on CodePlex as soon as we figure out how to push a magic publishing button. The DAX Editor is a brand new extension to VS 2010. It’s totally unrelated to the MDX and DAX formatter already available .  In this new extension, the user can edit DAX queries.  The extension...

I am spending the next couple of days getting ready for PASS Summit 2011 . I have a session on Thursday afternoon, 3 PM, on Developing and Managing a Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM) in SQL Server Code Name “Denali” Analysis Services . The talk won’t be just a rehash of the stuff on my blog (although you will definitely see some of its content live). I also have a very cool demo to share with all of you. Without giving too much away, some people on our team have developed a very nice sample...

It is possible for the tabular designer to get into an error state. If you try to save the model, you can get this error message: “Unable to save the file Model.bim. Reason: The file cannot be saved because it is marked as readonly.” Most of the time, you see this error if the tabular designer has lost the connection to the workspace database server at some point during the editing session. This can happen if the workspace database server is restarted or if the network connectivity is lost. We did...

Marco Russo has a nice post about the basics of configuring the workspace database server . You can use his post to learn how to set the tabular instance to use for the workspace database server for new and existing projects. However, there’s more to picking a workspace database server than just picking an instance. You should think about whether you are picking a local or remote instance, and you should also think about the service account running the instance. Your choices here affect the behaviour...

The System.Security.Cryptography.Xml namespace has been there since the dawn of time, and the look and feel of the API is rough at best. To top that, the MSDN documentation isn’t really something to lean on either, and it’s been a long, long time since I last tried to get acquainted with it. I’ve done some [...] Blog Post by: larsw