Tabs Studio Blog (organizing Visual Studio document tabs)

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.

SQL Server Management Studio uses quite different scheme for tab names from Visual Studio. Here is the screenshot of default tab names (I temporarily configured Tabs Studio to not group tabs):

I’ve significantly improved SSMS support in the next Tabs Studio version:

1. Separate settings for SSMS.

Now SSMS 2005/2008, VS 2005/2008 and VS 2010 have separate settings. You can customize each of the three product lines independently.

2. Remove path from tab name works for SSMS.

Turning on the Remove path from tab name option strips parentheses and removes path from tab names in SSMS now:

3. Special title grouping rules for SSMS out of the box.

Tabs Studio now uses new default title grouping rules when running in SSMS that both group tabs and strip parentheses:

4. Support for SSMS table paths.

Documents representing tables in SSMS have document paths like “Server[@Name=’COMP1′]/Database[@Name=’ReportServer’]/Table[@Name=’ActiveSubscriptions’ and @Schema=’dbo’]”. Tabs Studio now applies path grouping rules to these paths as well.

Update: Tabs Studio v1.7.9 with these changes is ready for download.

I’ve added Tabs Studio registration with SQL Server Management Studio 2008 to the Tabs Studio installer. There will be no need to manually setup and run the .reg file any more.

“SQL Server Management Studio is an integrated environment for accessing, configuring, managing, administering, and developing all components of SQL Server.” It uses the same Visual Studio shell as Visual Studio and after making some small changes I was able to use Tabs Studio tabs in SSMS IDE. I verified that Tabs Studio integration with SSMS works on the computer with SQL Server 2008 Enterprise or Developer edition:

1. Install Tabs Studio v1.6.4

If Tabs Studio installer fails to find Visual Studio, create the Visual Studio 2008 folder in your Documents folder.

2. Register Tabs Studio for SSMS

• Download the TabsStudioSSMS_100.reg file.
• Modify path to TabsStudio.dll in this file in two places according to your settings. E.g. change C:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrator\\My Documents\\Visual Studio 2008\\Addins\\TabsStudio.dll to C:\\Users\\me\\Documents\\Visual Studio 2008\\Addins\\TabsStudio.dll.
• Run modified TabsStudioSSMS_100.reg (admin rights are not required, all settings are for the current user).

3. Run SQL Server Management Studio

To disable Tabs Studio in SSMS change LoadBehavior to 0 in the reg file or directly in the registry.

I’m not a regular SSMS user. Please let me know if Tabs Studio behaves not as expected in SSMS IDE.