Well it's taken me slightly longer to get around to writing this than originally planned, however...

Visual Studio 2005 support, along with cross-database/linked server support was one of our top two requested features for SQL Prompt 3.5. It got to the point where not a day would go past without somebody emailing sales or support to ask about it, and of course all these emails eventually found their way into my inbox. Then of course we had people asking on the support forums as well, so I guess in some ways it might seem quite odd that we didn't include it the first time around in version 3.

The reason is that we did a survey and the survey told us that 90% of people either used Query Analyzer or SQL Server Management Studio, with around 50% of them using QA. Only around 5% of people used Visual Studio 2005 for editing SQL at this stage. This was in May 2006 and we were aiming to get SQL Prompt 3 out at the end of September (hah! - not that I'm bitter), so it seemed reasonable to target only QA and SSMS. Obviously times change and by the time we did release SQL Prompt 3.0 and 3.1 the uptake of Visual Studio 2005 would have been greater, and more people were asking for VS 2005 support. And so we've added it for 3.5.

So if you're editing a database project, or scripting and editing objects using the server explorer you can now use SQL Prompt to help you out. Actually in the RC due to an oversight just using the server explorer in a standard project SQL Prompt doesn't work properly, however we've now fixed this so when we release the final version, hopefully, although not definitely, at the end of next week, this will be working fine. One thing I should say is that for commercial rather than technical reasons, we don't support VSTS for Database Professionals, popularly known as Data Dude.

As far as limitations go there really aren't any; you should find that it works just as well as in SSMS or QA. The only difference is that you'll probably find it asks you for authentication credentials slightly more often that it does in the other editors because it is not always possible to extract the complete credentials from Visual Studio.

In my next post I'll talk about the cross-database and linked server support and give a few simple examples.