Outlook 2007 issue while SQLPrompt is running

thx1200

Myself and my company's entire development staff are running SQLPrompt 2. We are considering purchasing SQLPrompt 3. We are also in the process of upgrading our Microsoft Office system to 2007 Pro Plus.

When SQLPrompt is running and you compose an email message, many keystrokes will not be received by Outlook (Word editor). This only occurs in version 2007. Keystrokes such as CTRL+anything, Home, End, PageUp, PageDown, etc. seem to be trapped and never passed through to Outlook. Letter and number keys pass through just fine.

After some discussion on the Office Outlook message group, it was discovered that all people who had this problem were running SQLPrompt. Upon exiting SQLPrompt, Outlook functioned as normal for everybody.

Before we ugprade to version 3, we need to make sure this issue is resolved, as SQLPrompt is "nice to have" but Office 2007 is a necessity for our company.

Is this a "bug" in SQLPrompt or a "bug" in Outlook for which SQLPrompt may have to provide a workaround for until (if) MS releases a patch?

Thank you for any insight you can provide.

Bart Read

Hi there,


SQL Prompt 2 operates by intercepting all keystrokes, and it's meant to pass on all of those that aren't routed to a relevant window... however it's a little buggy so I suspect this is why you're having this problem with Outlook 2007.

SQL Prompt 3 uses an entirely different mechanism and installs as a plug-in for SQL Server Management Studio and Query Analyzer so I'd be nothing short of staggered if you did experience it.

All of that said, I'd still recommend you try it on your own machine before parting with cash. It has a 14-day fully functional trial so you can either download version 3.0 from there, or if you're feeling brave download the 3.1 EA release mentioned in the announcement at the top of this page. The final version of 3.1 should be available late next week or early the week after. Note that if you're using the Express Edition of SQL Server Management Studio you'll need 3.1.

Hope that helps.


Thanks,
Bart

PDinCA

If it helps, Im running SQL Prompt 3 with Office 2007 Pro Plus and there are no unwanted keystroke intercepts. Both products have been installed and used concurrently for over a month with Outlook being always open and SSMS with SQL Prompt being active for 99% of the time. You should have no problems...

Bart Read

Thanks Steven, we haven't updated to Office 2007 yet and haven't really done any testing with it installed so that's good to know. As I said, I'd be really surprised if you did have a problem with it.
Cheers,
Bart

VisualDragon

I can also confirm that SQL Prompt 3 works very well with Office 2007 installed. I experienced no issues at all. I was also running on Vista Ultimate and found no problems there. In fact, Version 3 is required IMHO for Vista as version 2 runs very slow and does some weird things.

You can actually watch it back up and type out the snippets as if you were typing it yourself. Neat to watch but completely unusable.

Bart Read

Thanks Dave, that's good to know. 3.1 should improve things further on Vista as there were a couple of problems with the Options dialog on 3.0 that have now been fixed. To be honest if you're trying to run 2.0 on Vista I'd have to say that's... extremely brave.
Cheers,
Bart