Ecosystem Project

edited April 26, 2016 3:56AM in SQL Search
I'm sure this isn't the correct place for this question but its as close as I could find so....
I was looking to develop a set of Addins for SSMS and wanted to know if the Ecosystem is still an active development environment or not.

P.S. I used the "SQL Search 2" category since it is itself an Addin for SSMS.

Comments

  • Thanks for contacting us and for your interest!

    I believe that the answer to this is Yes it is still active, but I have pinged the devs to see if they have some insight on this.
    Here is the documentation on the ecosystem https://documentation.red-gate.com/disp ... em+project

    Kindly,
    Andrew Pierce
    Technical Sales Engineer
    Redgate Software
  • Hi;

    The ecosystem project is active - in the sense that the downloads are still available and it's possible to build addins against it - but we wouldn't recommend people start new addins using it, as it not possible for us to support the latest version of Management Studio with the framework.

    In the latest preview builds of Management Studio, Microsoft have switched the shell from VS2010 to VS2015, and in the process have disabled the old addin mechanism, meaning all future Management Studio extensibility will be done through .vsix packages, as with Visual Studio. These packages require up-front (build-time) declaration of buttons, commands and menu entries required by extensions, which means that it is no longer possible for the framework to dyamically load plugins and create interfaces for them - which is the main benefit provided by the Ecosystem Project.

    Existing addins on will continue to work on SSMS2014 and earlier, and the ecosystem framework will continue to work for that, but for anything newer, you will have to build a .vsix package.

    Regards;
    Chris
    Software Engineer
    Red Gate Software
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