SSMS : Allow support for AddIns as in Visual Studio by Simon Sabin

We have created add-in for SSMS: SSMSBoost - which is meant to Boost development in SSMS. If someone is missing some feature, or is waiting for it for last 5 years - just write us and we will try to implement it.
Currently we have about 10 features that many developers, including ourselves already use in daily work.
My personal favorites are:
-Script object directly from SQL Editor - just place cursor on it an hit "F2"
-"Sessions" - named sets of documents
-Connection management (preferred connections)
-and more... - suggestions and feedback are welcome

Folks, thank you for writing to Microsoft. We appreciate you’ve requested this support in SSMS for a while now. We took a hard look at officially supporting and allowing add-ins in SSMS but unfortunately it did not make the Denali release after we triaged it against other higher priority customer requests for SSMS.

We have documented our official position on SSMS add-ins and extensibility in the Denali BOL (link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174219(v=SQL.110).aspx) which is also copied below:

SQL Server Management Studio is built upon the Visual Studio Isolated Shell, which inherently supports extensibility (add-ins/plug-ins). It is possible to tap into the Visual Studio extensibility services to surface custom capabilities within SQL Server Management Studio; however, such extensibility is not supported.

There are some users and third parties that have developed extensions to SQL Server Management Studio. While we do not discourage this, keep in mind that such extensibility is not supported, so there may be issues with backward/forward compatibility. Microsoft does not publish documentation for extending SQL Server Management Studio. There are, however, community blogs and sample code that you may be able to leverage.

Microsoft does not support SQL Server Management Studio installations with SQL Server Management Studio extensions present, so if you have installed SQL Server Management Studio extensions, you may want to remove them before calling Microsoft Customer Support about a SQL Server Management Studio issue.

Regards,
Sanjay Nagamangalam
Principal Program Manager, SQL Server Manageability

This is top of my personal list of SSMS features. The SQL team obviously have limited resources when it comes to SSMS enhancements, so it would be fantastic if it were possible for the community to step in and lend a hand at extending functionality.

I'm sure we'd see an explosion of real productivity enhancing plugins if SSMS were to implement plugins in a similar way to VS2010 using MEF.

I am looking for the third time for a way to add a piece of code to a management studio (be it a proprietary/own code for import/export/transform/list/print or whatever with content of database(s). It sounds that it would be not too much of a job to implement that (especially knowing that management studio is built around visual studio infrastructure), but nothing happens.

Could you, please, do it, finally? Just a way to add a procedure to be called as some node in server explorer, and possibly with a way to fill in programmatically elements of a submenu of a clicked item.

Simon,
    I have been using a third party add-in to SSMS since about the time you posted your original suggestion. Have you looked at the Red Gate tools? Their SQL Prompt product does code layout and has a better "IntelliSence" than what is provided in SSMS.

I apologize - didn't mean to sound too strong on that! We are looking at add-ins for SSMS, but since we don't support them now, I wanted to ensure that you knew we might break them. We had that happen once and the person wasn't too thrilled.

I did log this as a suggestion some time back - thanks again for using Connect!

Buck Woody

This is a suggestion. Your comment Buck is a bit strong.

I am asking for you to support it so we can extend SSMS.

Have a look at some of the things we have been able to achieve in the BI Development Studio with BIDSHelper www.codeplex.com/bidshelper and imagine what could be possible in SSMS if it had add-in support.

We don’t enable or authorize the creation of add-ins for Management Studio, and so we don’t provide support for them either. Moreover, we can’t guarantee that any specific add-in that works today will work in the future. So if you create and use any add-ins, you do so at your own risk.

Buck Woody, SQL Server Program Manager