I was very lucky, and honored, this year to be picked as a part of the Redgate President’s Club. This is our sales award club, which primarily goes to reps, but sales engineers and others are picked. I was one of the wild cards, as I helped on a lot of deals last year, so today I’m in Cambridge meeting with product people and execs.
While I’m over there, you get to re-read Other IDEs. Leave a comment and let me know if things have changed since I first wrote that. Are you using another IDE?
Voice of the DBA 
Steve – Took me a few to figure out that was an old post b/c when I clicked on the email I got for this it took me to your original 2000 article. Do you still feel the same way about ADS and its more html based look to the IDE?
I’m not a fan of this push to everything being HTML-ish. I get why they push it but to me its more of this 1 size fits al approach which I’ve never been a fan of for anything be that having 1 programing language for everything, 1 look to IDE’s or just 1 do it al tool in your literal physical toolbox in your garage. We humans reached specialization in work long ago and sometimes it feels like the powers that be want to try and push us back to something like a one-tool approach b/c it makes it easier on the vendor to support. In our company’s accounting software we used to have 5 different custom reporting tools and while there was some cross over they were all about doing something best. For example one option was best for custom financials but was terrible at letter style reports like late notices or lease agreements. Another was great at letters but could never be used for financials. Now the vendor has consolidated this and scaled back to a couple of choices trying to justify 1 tool for doing it all and while it can do it all, it can’t do it near as well. The clients pay the price so the vendor can have it easier.
It sure would make things easier on MS if they could move all to ADS and get rid of SSMS altogether. MS re-did OL not long ago and the NEW OL was met with anything but positivity. All the marketing./sale people and of course MS’s partners tried to paint a picture of the New OL being welcome and beloved but it wasn’t. If you checked any OL forum not controlled by MS you could see the hatred for the New OL and with good reason. I’m confident that the New OL is b/c the old one had become so cumbersome that it become difficult to impossible to update, patch, expand. And so I get why MS created it but where they made a mistake was trying to use that opportunity to force users onto a version of OL that was not what users wanted but wat MS Mgt wanted users to want.
Anyway… I too do not care for ADS’s HTML-ish look/feel but I fear we haven’t got many more years before SSMS will be phased our or worse, ADS re-branded as SSMS while still looking and working like ADS.
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