The SQL Tools team has been hard at work addressing various feedback items and bug fixes to improve your SSMS 21 experience. To get the most out of SSMS, be sure to use the latest version. You check for new updates directly from SSMS by going to Help > Check for Updates, or by opening the Visual Studio Installer. You can download the latest version of SSMS 21 here. Keep reading to learn more about our latest improvements including changes for Registered Servers and Central Management Servers (and as always, don’t forget to check out our Documentation site and our official Release Notes!).

Central Management Server (CMS) dialog changes

This release includes notable changes for Registered Servers, specifically those that are part of a Central Management Server (CMS). If your company uses CMS to maintain server lists, this information is for you.

Back in SSMS 20 we updated to version 5.x of the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient (MDS) driver, which defaults to use Mandatory (True) for encryption, instead of Optional (False). If you’re not familiar with this change, check out Connect to SQL Server Management Studio.

The information for a registered server that is part of a CMS doesn’t persist. This is by design and has always been the case…it just wasn’t an issue before SSMS 20 because the default encryption was false.  We’ve realized that the New Server Registration dialog that appears when you register a server for CMS has contributed to confusion about this, so we’ve changed it:

The updated New Server Registration dialog only displays server name, registered server name, and registered server description fields.

In addition, starting in SSMS 21.4.8, when you connect to a registered server, the connection information for that server is added to the user’s Most Recently Used (MRU) list of connections, if it doesn’t already exist.  This means if you select Trust Server Certificate for the connection, it will be saved in the connection.  The MRU is accessible in the connection dialog, whether you’re connecting to Object Explorer, a query editor, or anywhere else in SSMS.

If you run multi-server queries against a server group within a CMS, you must either have a trusted certificate installed (highly recommended for improved security), have the Trust Server Certificate option set to Mandatory for the actual CMS, or you must have MRU entries for each server in the group.  Please see Connect to a registered server in a Central Management Server (CMS) for more information.  We’ve also updated all the documentation for Registered Servers (both for CMS and Local Server Groups). If you still have questions after reviewing the docs, please leave a comment on this post.

User feedback addressed

The team has continued to address user feedback submitted to the SSMS Developer Community site. Fixes for the following feedback items were addressed in the 21.4.8 release: 

• Always Encrypted: Fixed an issue that prevented Always Encrypted set up to be completed when using SSMS with Russian localization. See: Can not set up Always Encrypted with Azure Key Vault when using SSMS with Russian localization.
• Connection Dialog: Fixed a bug that caused the Modern connection dialog (Preview) to clear its recent and pinned connections when multiple instances of SSMS were open. See Connections Dialog forgets connections.
• View Designer: Resolved an issue that generated an error message when using CONVERT or CAST with several data types. See SSMS returns error on valid query in view designer.
• Files: Updated the default location for File Save to %USERPROFILE%\Documents\SQL Server Management Studio 21. See File Open and File Save are using as different location to SSMS 20.
• Query Data Store: Addressed an issue where Overall Resource Consumption was incorrectly aggregating data when the display time was set to "Local." See QDS - Overall Resource Consumption graphs return incorrect information when choosing “Time format: Local” with aggregation per day.
• Results Window: Resolved an issue where scrolling multiple datasets in the results grid did not behave as expected. See SSMS 21.0 - scrolling issue in results window.

As always, we recommend keeping SSMS up to date for the best experience. In addition, if you use third-party extensions with SSMS, such as those from RedGate, please ensure you are using the latest version. RedGate has published a blog post with details about a recent update that addresses connection issues with Azure SQL Databases. 

Thanks for reading, thanks for using SSMS 21, and thanks for making this community amazing!