Setting up a new Analysis Services project

The first step towards creating a new cube is to create a new Analysis Services project in SSDT. Immediately after doing this, we strongly recommend putting your new project into source control. It's easy to forget to do this, or not bother, because building a cube doesn't seem like a traditional development project, but you'll be glad that you did it when you receive your first request to rollback a change to a complex MDX calculation.

As you're probably aware, there are two ways of working with Analysis Services projects in SSDT:

You'll only be able to use source control software effectively if you work in the project mode. Therefore, it's a good idea to resist the temptation to work in online mode unless you're only making temporary changes to your cube, even though online mode often seems to be the most convenient way of working.

With all new Analysis Services projects, there are a few useful project properties that can be set. You can set project properties by right-clicking on the Project node in the Solution Explorer pane and selecting Properties, as shown in the following screenshot:

Here is a list of properties you may want to change at the project level, and the values you can set for them:

We'll be looking again at how Visual Studio project configurations can help you when you need to deploy your project to your production environment in Chapter 10, Going in Production.