An important part of the IDE is the Solution Explorer that contains a folder structure local to your project; in this structure you will find the different source code files organized into sections. As you can see in the screenshot, you have a folder for the different data sources, one for the cubes and so on. From this window you can open the files in your project for editing. By default it will open in the visual editor that lets you work with the object in a visual editor, but if you right-click on an object you can open up and view the source code for the object.

When developing Analysis Services' cubes, you will spend a lot of time in the Properties window. Every single object such as an attribute or a dimension has different properties that can be used to change the behavior of the object. Depending on what object you have highlighted in either the Solution Explorer window or in the main window, the Properties window displays the relevant properties. If you find it hard to navigate around the different properties, you should be aware of the sorting feature of the Properties window. This allows you to either view the properties by categories, or sorting them by name.

All the changes that you do in SQL Server Data Tools are local to the project itself. This means that you will not see anything on the server until you build and deploy your project to the server. To be able to build and deploy the project, you have to specify the build settings. These settings are the properties of the project. You can click on the Properties button in the Solution Explorer window, or use the Project menu to access the project properties.

The first important setting is on the Build menu, where you can target the server edition that you wish to deploy to. SQL Server comes in three major editions, and they are Standard, Business Intelligence, and Enterprise Editions. You also have a separate edition for developers that contains the same feature set as Enterprise Edition. When it comes to Analysis Services, there are some features that the Standard Edition does not have that are in the other editions. To make sure that you do not try and develop a solution that contains features that are not available in your edition, you have the ability to set the target server edition.

During the course of this book, we will use some features that are only available in either Business Intelligence or Enterprise Editions of Analysis Services. This means that you need access to a Developer, Business Intelligence, Enterprise, or Evaluation Edition servers to be able to follow all the steps in this book.

The second thing that you need to do is to set the target server that you will deploy your projects to. This is also done in the project properties under Deployment. Here you can specify the server and the database that you wish to deploy to.

In case you installed the instance that you will use for this book according to the instructions earlier in this chapter, you should have two instances of Analysis Services installed on your server; one in tabular mode that is the default instance, and one in multidimensional mode which is a named instance.

If this is the case, then you need to change the project properties so that the project is using the correct deployment server.