Hi Amir! I totally agree with you. I would much rather develop models in Power BI Desktop than SSDT/VS, it is a much more responsive UI and of course it is being enhanced more often! Lets achieve parity though, that is what forces me to use SSDT/VS!

Hi Amir,

Thanks for clarifying. I’m excited about letting customers deploy semantic models to Power BI and thus saving cost. I’m not so sure that “there is a broad consensus that PBID is a more productive IDE”. Historically, we’ve seen how community tools, such as BIDS Helper and DAX Editor, have filled in gaps in the Microsoft-provided design tools. This works for VS because it’s extensible. Power BI Desktop is not, which is another thing I’d like to add to my wish list. Ideally, I’d like to see Microsoft supporting both Power BI Desktop and SSDT to design semantic models deployed to both Power BI, AAS, and SSAS. Let’s give modelers the choice of which tool they prefer. This is conceptually similar to SSRS Report Designer and Report Builder.

Thanks for listening!

Teo,

I am think there is already a broad consensus that the Power BI Desktop is a more productive BI development environment for BI project than SSDT. Most Pros will admit (with a little whisper) that they already do most of their development there.

The challenge of the Desktop is dealing with high scale models (hundreds of tables) and advanced features that are simply missing as you outlined.

We are committed to fixing both. Make the Desktop appropriate for large scale Tabular semantic model development and add the missing advanced modeling features.

When we are done (and we move pretty you know), we believe will not want or need to use SSDT/VS anymore.

Thanks Amir! I’ll be following this closely. As you know I’m somewhat skeptical about changing paradigms. By biggest concern is speed of development. I need to need to see how Power BI Desktop will perform given that even SSDT can’t perform with more complicated schema. In addition, I’d like know what AS features will make the cut, especially:
Perspectives
Partitions
Actions
Source control integration
Ability to interchangeably use VS and Power BI Desktop and reverse engineer Power BI-hosted AS models to both formats. So, I’ve started with VS and want to move to Power BI Desktop, can I do it? And vice versa.
Open Power BI AS management endpoint (using SSMS, Profiler, AMO)

Out of curiosity, what do you think developers will gain by modeling in Power BI Desktop for organizational semantic models?

Well, Amir did advise that folks should start learning DAX a decade ago so I guess its now time to figure out how to do professional semantic modeling since it’ll be arriving in the Desktop shortly 🙂

Well, you better get ready to embrace it Teo because we are bringing the full power of professional semantic modeling to the Desktop!

We are committed to making the Desktop a no-compromise Pro BI development environment that will scale to the largest and most complex models. And this summer you will see the first big installment.

We have also fully committed to providing through Power BI Premium the best Analysis Services system you can find anywhere: Scaleable to new limits, fully programmable, with unique features found nowhere else, and with total and seamless integration with the rest of the Power BI stack.