Thursday, April 13, 2006

As I can see from statistics on my blog, the most popular topics are those devoted to IntelliSense support. I am indeed a huge fan of IntelliSense. After release of VS 2005 (and even before while working with it's beta version - Whidbey) I enjoy it's enhanced support at large. Event though there are couple of glitches in the current implementation, workarounds do exist. Beside working with C# in VS 2005 I spend a lot of time working with database scripts in SQL Server Management Studio (and with it's ancestors SQL Server Enterprise Manager and SQL Query Analyzer). The lack of IntelliSense in those tools are obvious. The current project I'm working on involve 6 pretty big databases with over a hundred table names and thousands columns I'm not really familiar. So, I spend a little time researching and looking for a tool to solve this problem and finally googled to a great tool - PromptSQL. Seems like it was around for a while, but for me personally it's huge discovery! Here is a breif description from their website:

It adds SQL Intellisense®-like word-completion for you when you are editing SQL using these [MS SQL Server Management Studio 2005, SQL Server 200  Enterprise Manager and SQL Query Analyzer and some other] products.  You can enable/disable PromptSQL for specific editors. PromptSQL simply sits behind the scenes and provides unobtrusive help when you press Ctrl-Space or when you type "." after a table/view/alias name.

Here is full ist of features. If you work with SQL a lot, give it a try, I'm pretty sure it will make your SQL live a helluva lot easier :-)!

Update (04/20/2006): Found another tool with similar functionality. SqlAssist "supplies high quality intellisense for SQL to your Visual Studio .NET IDE"