November, 2011

These questions (paraphrased) have come up a bunch of times so it’s not that hard to find the answer, but I just rediscovered them so it’s on topic for today. “I want to add a namespace to the Imports designer automatically at design time, so the user doesn’t have to do it manually. How can I do that?” “I modified a workflow using C# code to add/remove VB expressions. None of my VB expressions work at runtime because it can’t resolve the types involved (e.g. System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection...

In PowerPivot, the Edit Table Properties dialog box is used for a few things. It is used to add columns to a table, remove columns from a table, and adjust the set of rows included in the table. This works great for PowerPivot. All the data in the PowerPivot model is stored in a single partition, so there is no ambiguity as to what goes where. As soon as you change the table definition in the Edit Table Properties dialog, the partition definition for the table is modified, the table is reprocessed...

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next release 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 covers some of the work we are doing to add built-in support for bundling and minification into ASP.NET - which makes it easy to improve the...

Here is a pop quiz on impersonation when connecting to a data source for tabular models. Question 1: How many impersonation options are supported for tabular models? 2, as shown in the tabular designer 3 4, as shown in SSMS Question 2: My impersonation credentials are validated in the Import Wizard. True False Question 3: If I see data in the Preview and Filter pane in the Import Wizard, then the user specified in the impersonation page has access to the data source and my data will be imported....

Now that RC0 has arrived I can finally post about security for tabular models. I have put off writing about security because I think the RC0 documentation on this subject is really quite good so I don’t have too much to add. Also, we had a minor feature add for RC0 that is very exciting. You can now create and delete roles in SSMS. Also, you can edit the row filters for a role in SSMS. The row filter editing functionality in SSMS is rather rudimentary (no autocomplete or semantic error validation...

If you look in the metadata of a BIM file, or if you look at the .dax file generated by the DAX Editor , you will see the following perplexing comment: -------------------------------------------------------- -- -- PowerPivot measures command (do not modify manually) -- ---------------------------------------------------------- This is actually a meaningful comment. Despite having PowerPivot in the name, it is used in the tabular designer in Visual Studio as well. This header is used to tell the...

If you look carefully, you can see my roots showing. No, not my hair – you can see my old job showing. When I came to work on the Analysis Services team, we had to design an “environmentally friendly” Visual Studio package in a hurry using the Visual Studio extensibility framework , same as everybody else. You know who else did this? Workflow. I leveraged my experience (re: reused old designs and specs from my old friends) and you can see chunks of this in the tabular designer. For example, to change...

You’ve run the import wizard, and imported a bunch of tables into your tabular model. Now you want to import one more from that same connection. How do you do this? What you need is the Existing Connections dialog. To start the Existing Connections dialog, go to Model->Existing Connections or click the Existing Connections button on the toolbar: Either operation starts the Existing Connections dialog. Select the connection you want to reuse, then click Open: This operation then takes you directly...