A timely post Aaron.  I am getting the feeling that Intellisense is quickly going down in the "be careful what you wish for" column.

I was going to say that you should be happy if it's not working :-)

There's a space on the end of the link for "When IntelliSense Is Unavailable". Should be this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173434.aspx.

I frequently jump between 2005 and 2008 connections and lose bracket highlighting. I'm anxious to read this link. :)

What..."I was going to say that you should be happy if it's not working :-)"

You people got to be kidding me...

Use Red-Gate SQL Prompt and you will quickly grow to love intellisense...

Just to be able to do "select * from tableA" and have it fill in the names of the columns when I want is worth the price..

So what if intellisense not perfect.. it SAVES a huge amount of time...

-jfc-

Non-working Intellisense--which includes both Microsoft's and Red-Gate's implementations--wastes a lot more time than it saves. Although to be fair to RG, Microsoft's is much worse at this point in terms of getting in the way.

Microsoft's implementation autocompletes with candidates that don't make sense, greatly increasing the number of keystrokes needed in some cases (you need to back out the autocompletion).

RG's does not have that problem, but also doesn't support nearly as much--such as CTEs--and it has bugs where it will occasionally populate the candidate list with incorrect column names. It also often marks perfectly valid SQL as invalid, which does waste time. These comments, by the way, refer to the prerelease version of RG's newest offering in this space.

I hope that some vendor--RG, Microsoft, or other--will solve the Intellisense problem soon. I agree that it would save a lot of time, but the offerings today don't, and for me hurt rather than help my productivity.

One of tools that offer Intellisense for SQL Server 2005 and 2000 is our DbOctopus. Nice thing is it's free until September, so there're no reasons not to give it a shot. It's not just SQL code editor, but you can see that if you visit:

www.cogin.com/dboctopus/