How to develop a plug-in for Management Studio

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• Andras B Redgate › Posts: 249

  November 8, 2006 2:09AM

  wmeszar wrote:

  Hi,
  
  because of the currently unsupported feature by Microsoft, it would be great if you could support me or better the community with informations about how to develop Management Studio add-ins!?
  
  I allready know the helpfully project at http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/enisey.asp, but how I could get the actual connection info of a window or document?
  
  I hope you could and will help me
  Best Regard
  W. Meszar
  
  PS: I'm sorry but I haven't really had a chance to practice my english lately

  
  
  It is a world of pain I'm not sure about the legal implications of writing about how to write an add in, so I'll skip that part for now. But I hope that what we have done will persuade Microsoft that extending Management Studio is important, and they will write and release an API for it.
  
  Regards,
  Andras

  András Belokosztolszki, PhD
  Red Gate Software Ltd.

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• USGDBA Posts: 2

  November 18, 2006 11:47PM

  Wow, I wasn't expecting to find this question already being asked. My company has been using RedGate software for awhile now and my fellow admin let me know earlier in the week that the SQL Refactor download was available. The first thing that hit me after installing it was "Whoa, they managed to add an entire menu to Management Studio!" (not that the product itself isn't very very welcomed in its own right). I was recently researching how add a menu to MS as to have a convienient way to set up some mini utilites we wrote in C# within MS. I ended up using the very inadequate "External Tools" menu in MS. If anyone at Red-Gate could share any information (even in high level terms) on how to go about creating menu items in SSMS that would be a great help to me and, apparently, others. I'm of course putting the same question to MS, it is their product after all. But any help would really be appreciated.

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• USGDBA Posts: 2

  November 20, 2006 9:32AM

  Thought, I'd share the response I recvd from MS Forums. Looks like its on the radar but will be a long while in coming....
  
  "My team owns SQL Server Management Studio. In SQL Server 2005, we do not have any publicly documented or supported ways of plugging into Management Studio. We will be rectifying this in future versions of SQL Server. I was at PASS in Seattle, WA this past week and saw Red-Gate's SQL Refactor utility. What they have done is pretty impressive considering we have not made that information public.
  
  In future releases, we will try to follow Visual Studio's plug-in architecture. Once we are confident that our interfaces will not change significantly, we will release that information to the public.
  
  You could file this as a suggestion on Microsoft Connect. We will keep you in the loop as we make decisions throughout the product development lifecycle. http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/.
  
  Paul A. Mestemaker II
  Program Manager
  Microsoft SQL Server Manageability
  http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlrem/ "

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