.NET with BI development tips, tricks and experiences.

A colleague of mine found a handy way to run a single unit test in Visual Studio 2010. Go to Test -> Windows -> Test View, select the test you want to run and right-click. Hit Run Test and away you go.

Always remember to run all your tests though before you commit your changes.

Been busy creating a Silverlight/SSAS mashup recently to show off their potential when used together to both colleagues and clients. While attempting to build the measure selection/filtering interface I thought it would be pleasant if they were grouped by their… measure groups, hierarchically like they are when browsing a cube in SSMS or Visual Studio. Measures are easy enough to find as a collection on the CubeDef object as a MeasureCollection. But where are measure groups hiding?

Naturally I would have thought there would be a MeasureGroup or MeasureGroupCollection off the CubeDef – no such luck. Debugging and taking a closer look at the Measure object, in the PropertyCollection (the Properties member) I spyed the property MEASUREGROUP_NAME. The sweet smell of victory. So to get your measure’s measure group here is the C#:

Property measureGroupProperty = measure.Properties["MEASUREGROUP_NAME"];
string measureGroupName = measureGroupProperty.Value.ToString();


I was recently playing about with hiding the All member for several dimension attributes in my SSAS project. In order to hide the All member we set the IsAggregatable property to False. This immediately had the effect of my queries not returning any results. In hindsight my problem should have been blindingly obvious.

When we no longer aggregate the members on a dimension attribute, SSAS does not know what member/members to use unless you tell it explcitly, or set the DefaultMember attribute. Doing one or the other will stop your measures and calculations from vanishing.

After installing the Office 2010 Beta I continued to develop my SSIS and SSAS projects without interruption. In my spare time (a rare thing) I wanted to keep my web app skills up to date and continue to explore Silverlight and its all-singing, all dancing .NET RIA Web Services. All was well at first. I created a new web application project and started to create my master page and default web form when without cause I was not able to click on the Visual Studio 2008 window. The CPU was idle and I had no other apps open at the time other than Spotify. Tried the ALT+TAB to see if some modal dialog had gone astray but nothing…I was completely locked out.

I scratched my head for a while and tried restarting a few times. The only way I could kill VS2008 was using the Task Manager. The same occured each and every time with a web project. BI projects remained functional. I started to trawl the internet and did not find much but then I stumbled across Martin Hinshelwood’s blog and this article. He hit the nail right on the head.

If you have VS2008 locking you out on web projects after installing Office 2010 your solution awaits you here. Thanks Martin.