BI review & help

I've been thinking lately about the new Microsoft Chart controls which are based on the Dundas acquisition (made in April 2007). What is the meaning of this to us, the BI developers?

Until now we were always counting on the abilities of our BI products. Let's take Hyperion/Oracle Essbase for example. Let's say I want to have a special graph of a new type or a new feature in a graph. I couldn't do it at all, because the product's code is closed (someone has to do money, doesn't it?) and I can't add any more graphs or features. There are some products where I can do things like this. For example, in Panorama NovaView I can build a new KPI type or doing a sophisticated visualization using JavaScript and Panorama SDK, but that's a lot of coding.

Now, we have the ability to write graphs by coding them without large amount of code. We can customize them as we want and we're not limited by any product. The drawbacks are maintenance and knowledge that we need to have here, but these are things that we need in every product anyway. I didn't learned this framework yet so I can't tell where are the limits, but they seems pretty far. Alex Gorev is writing about it in his blog (web, rss) so you can learn more about it there. It will take time to see if it affects the BI development world, so all what left to do is to sit and wait.

Today I had a very disturbing coincidence.
My friend Ariel worked on a SSAS solution with no version control (we're using VSS). Instead of using that, he developed by opening the database on the server. I told him that he must fix it and we must have a recent version-controlled solution. In the past we asked Microsoft support how to do that (we lost all our vss files and had only the databases). They simply said that it's not possible. Ariel has found today that it can be made very easily using File -> New Project -> Import Analysis Services Database, as you can see in the picture: