Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Red Gate SSMS Ecosystem - The free SQL Server Management Studio Add-In Framework and Store (with both paid and free items)

simple talk - David Pond - Introducing the Red Gate SSMS Ecosystem

The Red Gate SSMS Ecosystem is a framework that makes it easy to develop, share and manage SSMS add-ins. We aim to help add-in developers build everything from homegrown solutions and community-driven projects to commercial solutions provided by partner companies. We hope that DBAs and database developers will benefit from better integrated tools.

Red Gate has lots of experience developing tools that integrate with SSMS. Over time, we’ve built a collection of common libraries and APIs that make developing SSMS add-ins much simpler. We’ve made these available free, so developers can build their own SSMS add-ins and integrate them with other tools.

The SSMS Ecosystem is a work in progress. Over time, we’ll be introducing new API features and adding add-ins to our directory. The initial benefit is the ability to integrate your tools with SSMS. In the future, we want to enable add-ins to use more Red Gate technologies and integrate with each other. Eventually, the SSMS Ecosystem will have a distribution platform similar to the Visual Studio Gallery where you can share, discover, and manage add-ins.

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The Red Gate SSMS Ecosystem is a framework that makes it easy to develop, share and manage SSMS add-ins. We aim to help add-in developers build everything from homegrown solutions and community-driven projects to commercial solutions provided by partner companies. We hope that DBAs and database developers will benefit from better integrated tools.

Red Gate has lots of experience developing tools that integrate with SSMS. Over time, we’ve built a collection of common libraries and APIs that make developing SSMS add-ins much simpler. We’ve made these available free, so developers can build their own SSMS add-ins and integrate them with other tools.

The SSMS Ecosystem is a work in progress. Over time, we’ll be introducing new API features and adding add-ins to our directory. The initial benefit is the ability to integrate your tools with SSMS. In the future, we want to enable add-ins to use more Red Gate technologies and integrate with each other. Eventually, the SSMS Ecosystem will have a distribution platform similar to the Visual Studio Gallery where you can share, discover, and manage add-ins.

SSMS ecosystem project

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The SSMS ecosystem project aims to enhance the SQL Server Management Studio experience by enabling tighter integration of SQL Server tools. The project will make it easier for DBAs and developers to customize their SSMS environment and optimize it for their work.

Get started

  1. Install the framework. Click here to download.
  2. Visit our Add-in directory and install something.

Tool developers

The project should make it easier to add functionality to SSMS. We hope this will encourage many people to develop and share tools. If you would like to develop a plugin, visit our Writing an add-in page.

Note

The ecosystem has to benefit all participants; users of SSMS, plugin developers and Red Gate. We reserve the right to withdraw the ecosystem if this is not the case.

Getting started

Notes

Add-ins using .NET 4.0 runtime can't be loaded in SQL Server Management Studio 2008R2 and earlier. NET 3.5 runtimes can be loaded into all SQL Server Management Studio versions.

Shared interfaces

You can download the latest shared interfaces from here: https://github.com/red-gate/SIPFrameworkShared

Framework

You will need to install the add-in from SSMS ecosystem project.

Installation

You need to make an entry in the Registry to tell our add-in host where to load you add-in from. You should create the registry entry in either:

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Add-in directory

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Free

SQL Search

Category: Navigation

SQL Search is an add-in for SQL Server Management Studio that lets you quickly search for SQL across your databases: find fragments of SQL text within stored procedures, functions, views and more; quickly navigate to objects wherever they happen to be on a server; find all references to an object.

Interesting project and one that I think there's a good deal of need for. Visual Studio has a very healthy Extension gallery, but SSMS much, much less so. If Red Gate by helping themselves also helps the community, well that's the definition of a win-win, isn't it?

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