Happy February! The SQL Tools team has kept the momentum up and we are happy to announce the release of Preview 4 today. If you have SSMS 21 Preview installed, you should get a notification of the new preview, or you can select Help > Check for updates within SSMS. The Visual Studio Installer will launch and check for an update, and you’ll see the update for Preview 4:

From here, you can choose to Update or Close. If you update, note that open instances of SSMS 21 will close.

Preview 4 has a few exciting updates, if you review the release notes you’ll find we’ve added additional IntelliSense functions, a bit more dark theme support, and last but definitely not least a new way to submit feedback for SSMS: integration with the Microsoft Developer Community site. 

The new way to submit feedback: the SSMS Developer Community

What is it?

Because SSMS 21 is based on Visual Studio 2022, we are able to leverage the existing Visual Studio Developer Community site. This move comes with big upgrades to the feedback experience! You can now upload images, scripts, and logs when you submit an item. If you report a bug directly from SSMS 21 (more on that in the next section), information specific to your installation of SSMS 21 will be attached to the ticket and sent to our team to aid in investigation. Once you submit your item, the community can see it, search for it, vote for it, comment on it, and you can easily see the status of the item (just like the old Ideas site!).

Upon item creation, an ADO item is created and sent directly to our engineering team. The Developer Community site also supports tagging in comment threads and private responses so you can keep track of a conversation and share important details with the SQL Tools team directly, without oversharing sensitive information.

How do I use it?

There are two ways to access the SSMS Developer Community site. The first is initiating a feedback request directly from within SSMS 21 (recommended), the second is to navigate to the SSMS Developer Community site: aka.ms/ssms-feedback.

You can log bugs, suggest features, or view your past feedback items from within SSMS 21 by selecting Help > Send Feedback > Report a Problem/Suggest a Feature/My Feedback. Or, you can click the icon at the top right of SSMS.

Clicking any of those will open a browser window where you will be asked to authenticate. If you have already added your Microsoft account to SSMS 21, you will be automatically authenticated!

When you report a bug or issue you’ll need to provide a title (required) and detailed description (required). In the description, you now can upload images, attach files, and tag someone.  Please keep these reports to a single issue. If you have multiple bugs to report, file them in separate reports.

You also have the option of selecting the severity of the issue impacting you: “I’m unable to use this version,” “It’s more difficult to complete my work,” “It bothers me. A fix would be nice,” or “Other.” 

When submitting a feature request, you’ll need to provide a clear title (required) and a detailed description (required). Again, you’re able to attach images, files, and tag people. Please keep these submissions to a single idea as well – if you have multiple suggestions, submit them in multiple posts.

Selecting My Feedback will take you to a view on the Developer Community site of your previously submitted bugs and feature requests.

What about my old posts on the Ideas site?

It is extremely important to our team that we retain the history of ideas, comments, and votes on previously submitted items. For those of who have been around for a while, we too remember Connect, and whatever was after that, and we know that this history is very important to the community.  We are working to migrate those ideas to the new Developer Community site, votes and comments included, so they are available to interact within the new experience.

Enjoy the preview, and please send us some feedback on the new site!