Sometimes it’s the little things...

rob_farley — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:10:43 GMT

The easiest way to convince someone to use SSMS 2008 over SSMS 2005 was to right-click on a results grid. They’d see “Copy with Headers” in the context menu and be sold immediately. I’d happily show them that they could configure this option in SSMS 2005, but to have it immediately available in SSMS 2008 was enough to convince many people to install the newer tools right away.

The new version (Denali CTP3) of Management Studio has a few little things that I don’t mind, even though none of them are quite as compelling as the “Copy with Headers” option.

I’m going to pick three:

Cycle Clipboard Ring

This is handy stuff. I copy & paste far too often when writing queries. I’ll be refactoring as I go, that kind of thing, looking at plans, copying out of the plan properties into comments, and so on. Invariably, I’ll think I have something on the clipboard, and find myself having to find it again because I will have replaced my clipboard with something else. So now I should be able to use Ctrl+Shift+V to get back to something which used to be in the clipboard. Brilliant. :)

Bear in mind, it’s in the Edit menu, but not in the Context menu (so you don’t see it if you right-click in the query pane).

Zoom

This is handy, but doesn’t go quite far enough for me. At the bottom of the query window, above the results, to the left of the horizontal scrollbar, it says “100%”

It’s a zoom function, so that I can make the text of my query bigger or smaller. This is great. I normally write queries in a surprisingly large font, and this means that when it’s just me looking at the screen, I can easily zoom out more and see what’s at the end of the longer lines.

I only wish that it would zoom the results too. Maybe that’s so we can tell our clients “Trust me – those results are correct”

Plus, it feels ironically small. Fortunately, you can use ZoomIt to make the Zoom button bigger.

Highlighting

Compare the following images:

In the interest of readability, I like to colour selected text in yellow, not blue or grey or whatever. It was a tip I picked up from Andrew Coates many years ago.

See if you can spot the difference between the SSMS 2008 Options dialog and the Denali one.

The Denali one is on the right, and you might notice that “Item foreground” is disabled. In SSMS 2008, it wasn’t. And we ended up with all the selected text being black on yellow.

In Denali, they’ve changed that. The yellow is made fainter (not sure why, but it is – this is as yellow as I can make it), and the text stays the colour that it was before we selected it. Useful stuff.

But I’m disappointed with this feature.

Notice – this line is commented out, but I can run it by selecting the commented text and hitting one of the many Execute buttons. The selected text is coloured green, because that’s what colour it was before it was selected.

But I can run it. Wouldn’t it be useful to have it coloured based on what’s selected? That way, you’d have a better idea about the parts of a selection were still commented out, and what you were actually about to run. This is particularly handy when you use the Alt-select option. It had always frustrated me that selected text was all the one colour, and I’m really glad they have fixed this – now I just want them to take it one step further.

Like this:

Am I asking too much?

@rob_farley

Denali’s Management Studio for CTP3 playing nice with others (almost)

rob_farley — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 06:40:24 GMT

Until recently, I’d only done stuff with Denali on a dedicated box. But this weekend, I took the plunge and installed SSMS on a machine that has older versions of SQL Server installed on it. You can download Denali from this link.

I’ve only installed the tools – I haven’t installed the Database Engine, Analysis Services, and so on. It’s more that I want to get using Denali’s tools on a more regular basis, and figure that for writing queries, demonstrating things, and so on, it should be useful to use the latest tool set. I’ve been an advocate of this approach for a long time, but had been nervous about installing a pre-“release candidate” version on a box that I wouldn’t be entirely thrilled about blowing away.

Anyway – so far I haven’t noticed any problems. I can happily use the new SSMS to connect to my other boxes, and it seems to play just fine.

For the most part, Denali’s SSMS feels very similar to older versions, even though the splash screen shows that it’s “Powered by Visual Studio”. Let’s face it, there were clearly things in older SSMS versions that made it clear it was using a Visual Studio shell of sorts, such as the way that panels and menus were handled.

But in Denali, they’re admitting it in an even stronger case, particularly in regard to shortcuts.

The biggest frustration I have with Denali SSMS is that it prompts you about whether you’d rather use traditional shortcuts or use the default Visual Studio ones. Straight away, I picture going into clients and feeling clumsy as I hit shortcuts that don’t do the right thing.

This scares me – the idea that I might hit a shortcut and have it do something wrong.

I haven’t gone into the shortcuts completely yet – but I’m already dreading it. People’s data is very important to them, and therefore to me as well. I will not risk it. I’ve learned that lesson before, and I hope to never have to learn it again. I do not want to ever use a particular shortcut that I’m supposedly familiar with, and find it does something different to what I expect.

Luckily, settings are stored in a file, so you can take that file with you. Also, that file is local to your own Windows profile, so you should be able to tweak stuff without affecting other people too much.

On my machine, the settings file is in: C:\Users\Rob\Documents\SQL Server Management Studio\Settings\SQL Server Management Studio

This means you should be able to make sure that the shortcuts you use are the ones you’re used to, not the ones that someone else prefers. I’d recommend to everyone to have their .vssettings file stored somewhere accessible (USB key, SkyDrive, whatever).

I’m already tweaking a few things, because despite the fact that I chose the option to use settings from my previous version, it didn’t bring them all across. Things like my default font size, which I generally have quite large because of the amount of presenting I do, and also the amount of working alongside clients (where it’s easier to have a large font so they can see what I’m doing). So now I’m going to be taking my .vssettings file along with me, for those times when I find things don’t quite work the way I’d like.

@rob_farley

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Sometimes it’s the little things...

Denali’s Management Studio for CTP3 playing nice with others (almost)