The SQL Tools team, in partnership with Visual Studio team, is thrilled to announce the release of SQL Server Management Studio 21 Preview 1, which is based on Visual Studio 2022 (17.13.0 Preview 1).
I often state, “It takes a village,” and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21 is no exception. We initiated work for this release after making SSMS 20.0 available in March. The teams committed significant time and energy to bring SSMS 21 Preview 1 to completion and land a November release. We have rebuilt SSMS from the ground up and are excited to bring it into a modern state and address many long-standing customer requests; we've linked the feedback items below for those interested.
What's new
As a result of SSMS 21 becoming a Visual Studio-based solution, SSMS now supports 64-bit, is available via a modern installer, and offers automatic updates. You can read more about the mechanics of the Visual Studio installer in the documentation. Thanks to the Visual Studio team, we will offer two channels for SSMS 21: Preview and Release. The Preview channel is currently the only available channel. Once SSMS 21 is Generally Available (GA), it will be available through the Release channel, and we will use the Preview channel to share early builds of future releases for those of you who like to stay on the cutting edge.
A review of the release notes may suggest there isn’t a whole lot that’s new in SSMS 21, which is misleading. Two features that users have been asking to see for a very long time are now available: Git integration and dark theme.
Git integration has always been an integral part of Visual Studio, and we are happy to bring it back to SSMS users. As noted in last week’s post, having this integration in SSMS 21 lays the groundwork to bring SQL projects to SSMS. The SQL projects team is focused on the current preview of SDK-style projects, which is work that must be completed before they can evaluate what needs to be done for support in SSMS.
In the SSMS Roadmap blog post from March, I stated that we committed to determining the engineering effort to implement dark theme. Once we had an estimate of what it would cost, it felt like we had two options: halt all work on SSMS to implement dark theme, or never implement dark theme. Multiple members of the community suggested that we implement dark theme over time, starting with the most-used dialogs and then systematically working through all the dialogs. We made the decision to take that approach, with dark theme available initially for Object Explorer, the Query Editor and Results pane, and Template Explorer. If you enjoy dark theme and want to provide input as to what dialogs we should theme next, please try out SSMS 21 via the Preview channel and comment on this feedback item with your input.
While our primary goal for SSMS 21 is to achieve parity with SSMS 20 (but obviously on Visual Studio 2022, with a new installer, etc.), we have been able to make other improvements. Some of those are thanks to Visual Studio 2022, others are community requests:
- Always Encrypted Assessment
- Support for vertical tabs in the editor (on the top right of the editor window, you’ll see a small gear icon, which will bring up the placement options)
- Additional options for tabs and windows (available in Tools > Options > Environment > Tabs and Windows) such as colorizing documents by project or file type, setting the minimum and maximum tab width, and more
- The ability to customize the font and background color for cells in the results gride that contain NULL values
- Create logins and users for Azure SQL database in the UI
- New page in the database properties dialog for Database Scoped Configuration options
- Language support for Czech, Polish, and Turkish
What's fixed
We also implemented a few bug fixes in this release. Most notably, users of Registered Servers and Central Management Servers (CMS) can now save connection settings, such as Trust Server Certificate. We also addressed a couple issues around SSMS hanging when trying to connect to an Azure SQL Database, and you type in the incorrect database name in the database dropdown, or the user doesn’t have permissions to all the databases on the logical server, or the database has been deleted and you try to connect to it.
What's missing
There are a lot of changes in SSMS 21, but when you open it for the first time, it has the familiar look of the application you’ve been using for years. We do have a few known issues in this preview, documented separate from the release notes. It’s important to note that SSMS 21 Preview 1 does not have support for Analysis Services and Integration Services, and therefore also does not have support for Maintenance Plans. We are working with the respective teams to bring these features back to SSMS 21 in a later preview. You’ll also likely notice some strings that reference Visual Studio – we are working through that list and hope to have them updated in the next preview.
What's next
Whew. We’re not done! There are additional projects that are in progress and will be available in later previews:
- Support for roaming settings and consolidation of settings
- Improving the startup time for SSMS
- Improving the Azure authentication experience
- New connection experience
- Format JSON output in the results pane
- Resolve the issue with SSMS forgetting passwords
We've also added our roadmap to the documentation, which will update with major releases.
Copilot and Extensions
Last week we also announced that Copilot in SSMS will be available in Private Preview, therefore it is not available in this public preview of SSMS 21. If you would like to participate in the private preview, you can indicate your interest here. Copilot in SSMS will be an opt-in experience, available as an extension.
On the topic of extensions, any third-party extensions for SSMS will need to be updated to 64-bit to work with SSMS 21. This may not be a trivial process for some individuals and companies. We recognize that some users won’t even try out the SSMS 21 Preview 1 release until their favorite extension is available, and we understand. We ask you to be patient with the folks that own those third-party extensions, as we were not able to share a build in advance to give them a head start on updating their extension. With the SSMS 21 Preview 1 release you can expect the same experience for extensions that you see in SSMS 20. Long-term, we will bring full support for extensions to SSMS, including the ability to browse extensions from within SSMS, a presence in the Visual Studio marketplace, and support of the VSIXInstaller.
Feedback
If we missed anything in this post, please check out the FAQ page to see if it’s addressed there. If not, please leave a comment and we’ll follow up. We will continue to leverage the feedback site to track the improvements the community wants to see in SSMS. If you have any issues with the SSMS 21 Preview 1 release, please log them on the feedback site (and please search within the Tooling group first!). For any issues you log, please include detailed steps to recreate, and it would be helpful to include "SSMS 21 Preview 1" in the feedback title. We will have multiple preview releases, and we would like to use this feedback loop to incorporate feedback and quickly resolve issues.
Those of you that have read all the way to end: Bravo! You're a true SSMS supporter and our team appreciates your continued use of the tool we’ve poured our hearts into this year. We hope you enjoy exploring all the new features in SSMS 21, and we look forward to bringing you more previews in the coming months.
Microsoft
