Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta to Land on February 29th

Along with the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft will also be unveiling Visual Studio 11's beta version next Wednesday.
Visual Studio 11 along with Team Foundation Server 11 has "hundreds" of latest features and Microsoft is addressing a very small selection before the release of the beta version. Visual Studio 11 will offer holistic solutions and also performance enhancements for various regularly performed tasks.

Unlike Visual Studio 2010, which is full of attractive colours, the new Visual Studio 11 is more "grey" to look at. For improving the scope to focus on text without any distraction the company decided to get rid of bright colours on the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), reported ARS Technica.
The new version is simpler as well as flatter as it does not have subdivisions, gradients and any other unnecessary details. This Metro designed version looks a lot like Visual Studio 2003, Office XP and Expression Blend. However, there is another version having darker theme but same simple and flat design.
Microsoft confirmed that Visual Studio 11 beta and .NET 4.5 beta will launch on 29th February.

The default toolbars in VS 2010

The default toolbars in VS 11

For more information about the GUI go to MSDN.

Clarizen in top 25 most important Online PM Software

Clarizen, the online project management solution, was selected as one of the top 25 of the most important Online project Management Apps by GetApp.com. The infographic on Top Online Project Management Software can be found here.

BI Architects uses Clarizen for managing its projects and has developed a BI solution for Clarizen. More on our BI solution can be found in this blog Business Intelligence extension for Clarizen.

Addition to BIDS: Table Difference component

One question arising very often in the Data Warehouse programming is "What are the differences between two tables?" You receive several million customers and should decide what changes need to be done. The standard SSIS toolkit provides SCD component for handling this process, but it is of no practical use when you have to handle more than a couple of thousand records. The Table Difference component doesn't have this limitation.

The component has two inputs: one for "old" and one for "new data". The old and new rows are compared and the result is sent to different outputs:

• Unchanged rows (same in both old and new)
• Deleted rows (appear in old but not in new)
• New rows (appear in new but not in old)
• Updated rows (appear in both old and new, but there is a change)

The diagram below illustrates the component functionality better than thousand words:

Occasionally you may have a requirement to perform different updates, for different columns. The component includes option to tag each input column with identifier. Then for each unique identifier, a separate update output is created and maintained. In this way you can tag with "10" the historical attributes and with "20" the other columns and decide what kind of operation to carry on with the different updates.

The component inputs MUST be sorted and have a collection of fields (keys) that let the component decide when two rows from the inputs represent the same row. This is easily accomplished in SQL with a simple “order by” and a convenient index. Usually slowly changing dimensions maintain an index by the business key, so the sorting requirement is easily accomplished and do not represent a problem.

Click here for more information about the Table Difference component.

BI solution additional to use of Clarizen's online project mgt software

BI Architects develops Business Intelligence solutions for its customers. Furthermore it has developed BI solutions for managing its own business processes, such as the solution that helps the project managers monitor, track and report project progress (including KPI's and earned values), the finance department enable swift and correct detailed invoicing and the management team gaining direct insight in the performance/profitability of projects.


BI Architects has chosen the Clarizen's online project management software for the registration of customers, projects, milestones, tasks and writing time. The Clarizen tool takes care of the complete project administration/resource management/and much plus it gives basic insight in performance via reporting. What it lacks is giving a more detailed insight in the performance of project phases over projects (for comparing project performances and quality improvement), earned values (current status and expected outcome) of projects and more figures needed for project management that are available without starting reports, setting parameters, running the report and opening the result in MS Excel.


What we have done is developing a standard Microsoft SQL Server Integrated Services/SQL Server Analysis Services (SSIS/SSAS) solution that adds what we miss in the Project Management tooling. SSIS is used for the extraction, transformation and loading of data from the Clarizen database into a staging environment (dimension tables), while SSAS delivers actionable insights (cubes and its dimensions) and made available via a pivot table in Microsoft Excel.


All information is now available via MS Excel and on the fly customizable serving several purposes within the BI Architects (project) organization.


For more information on our project management BI solution please contact me via H.O.Israel@bi-architects.nl . For more information on Clarizen's online project management software go to Clarizen.com .


Hermann-Otto Israel
BI Architects project manager