Tabs Studio Blog (organizing Visual Studio document tabs)

On April 1 SQL Server 2016 Release Candidate 2 was released along with the SQL Server Management Studio March 2016 preview refresh v13.0.13000.55. This new version of SSMS uses the Visual Studio 2015 Isolated shell and doesn’t allow any 3rd party extensions like Tabs Studio.

Update (May 10, 2016): Thanks to Karl Burtram from Microsoft, Tabs Studio is now in the SSMS 2016 package load inclusion list.

SQL Server 2012 was released about a month ago:

The new management studio uses Visual Studio 2010 shell. Extensibility for SSMS 2012 is still not officially supported by Microsoft, but luckily Visual Studio add-ins work just fine in it. Unfortunately, Visual Studio extensions don’t work as ssms.exe contains white list of allowed package GUIDs. I had to change my Visual Studio 2010 helper extension to helper add-in and after that Tabs Studio works without problems in the new IDE:

Download link: Tabs Studio v2.7.0.

If you start SSMS as administrator on a Windows 7 machine with UAC on, you get the Class not registered error number 80040154 for the TabsStudio.Connect class:

Tabs Studio installation for SSMS includes registration of the TabsStudio.Connect class for the current user. On a Windows 7 machine with UAC enabled, elevated applications (in this case SSMS running as admin) don’t see registered per-user COM classes (see Per-User COM Registrations and Elevated Processes with UAC on Windows Vista SP1 for more details). I can’t add per-machine TabsStudio.Connect registration to the installer because it runs without admin rights. A workaround is to register TabsStudio.Connect per-machine manually, double clicking a registration file I’ve prepared.

SSMS is a 32-bit application. Running on 32-bit Windows it uses per-machine COM registration from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\CLSID, on 64-bit Windows – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\WOW6432node\CLSID (see Registry changes in x64-based versions of Windows Server 2003 and in Windows XP Professional x64 Edition). I’ve prepared two registration files – one for 64-bit Windows and one for 32-bit Windows.

Note that after unsuccessful loading SSMS disables Tabs Studio and doesn’t try to load again on a next start. To enable Tabs Studio startup loading you can reinstall Tabs Studio or change HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Shell\Addins\TabsStudio.Connect\LoadBehavior from 0 to 3.

Download links for per-machine TabsStudio.Connect class registration: SSMS on Windows 32-bit, SSMS on Windows 64-bit.

The most frequent support question I receive is how to work with tabs in SQL Server Management Studio. To improve the first impression for Tabs Studio in SSMS, I’ve decided to disable default SSMS tab grouping:

If you want tab grouping, two sample expressions equal to the default regex in previous releases are readily available:

SQL Server Management Studio adds the [ReadOnly] prefix to the window title for read only scripts. It also adds Debugging… and Executing… suffixes when SQL scripts are debugged and executed:

I’ve added additional processing for such titles that removes excessive text and adds appropriate status icons:

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 2008 has several built in tab text options:

You can shorten tabs by omitting parts like server name or login name – SQLQuery1.sql was created with default settings, SQLQuery3.sql was created with database, login and server names off. These options don’t exist in SSMS 2005.