When you install the database projects template of SSDT you get SQL Server Object Explorer (SSOX) installed as well. SSOX is a pane within Visual Studio and is the main enabler of the Connected Development experience that the SSDT team have attempted to provide. SSOX provides some really cool capabilities that are not in SQL Server Management ...

In my blog post SQL Server devs–what source control system do you use, if any? (answer and maybe win free stuff) of 18th October 2012 I complained about one aspect of Source Control in Team Foundation Server (TFS) that infuriates me: …there are aspects to TFS source control that annoy me day-in, day-out. Chief among them has to be the fact ...

I’ve just been alerted by my colleague Kyle Harvie to a Visual Studio 2010 add-in that should prove very useful if you are an SSDT user. Its simply called Highlight all occurrences of selected word and does exactly what it says on the tin, you highlight a word and it shows all other occurrences of that word in your script: There’s a ...

One of the major criticism to DAX is the lack of a decent editor and more in general of a dedicated IDE, like the one we have for T-SQL or MDX. Well, this is no more true. On Codeplex a very interesting an promising Visual Studio 2010 extension has been released by the beginning of November 2011: http://daxeditor.codeplex.com/ Intellisense, ...

Last week when RC0 was released, the updated installer for ''Juneau'' (SQL Server Data Tools) was not available. Depending on how you tried to get it, you either ended up on a blank search page, or a page offering the CTP3 bits. Important note: the CTP3 Juneau bits are not compatible with SQL Server 2012 RC0. If you already have Visual Studio ...

Its no great secret that Juneau, a collection of features in the forthcoming SQL Server codenamed Denali, will be in the next version of Visual Studio but its nice to have it confirmed all the same. I have installed the first publicly available drop of that next version (known as Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, download from here) that was ...

Okay, I'll be the first to admit, I tried to install CTP3 on a machine without first cleaning up the CTP2 bits. My primary motivation was to be able to query the catalog views to detect any metadata changes that I hadn't already talked about here. As you might have guessed, this experiment did not go well. In a couple of cases I have installed ...

SQL Server Developer Tools (SSDT) - code-named ''Juneau'' - is now available. Many (including myself) believed that Juneau was simply a part of BIDS in CTP3, but after trying to use Juneau-specific functionality that this was not the case. As indicated on the Developer Tools page, and on the SSDT blog, you can download Juneau now through a Web ...

Earlier today I had a need to get some information out of a Visual Studio project file and in this blog post I’m going to share a couple of ways of going about that because I’m pretty sure I won’t be the only person that ever wants to do this. The specific problem I was trying to solve was finding out how many objects in my database project (i.e. ...

In SQL Server Denali, Management Studio has been entirely migrated from its earlier incarnation.  Previously SSMS had slight traces here and there that it was a distant cousin to Visual Studio; in this release, it is a full-fledged immediate family member.  There are some great things that come of this, but there are some negative ...