Sorry to call this out in a separate post (I talked about a bunch of SSMS Connect items the other day), but Aaron Nelson (blog | twitter) jogged my memory today about an issue that has gone unfixed for years: the custom coloring for Registered Servers is neither consistent nor global.

For one of my servers, I've chosen a red color to show in the status bar.  Let's pretend this is a production server, and I want the red to remind me to use caution.  I can set this up by right-clicking a Registered Server, choosing Properties, and moving to the Connection Properties tab:

Once I save, a new query window – when launched by right-clicking the Registered Server and choosing New Query – looks like this:

This is a great feature, if only it worked all the time. 

For example, if I right-click within the above query window and choose Connection > Change Connection, and switch to a server that doesn't use a custom color (or uses a different color), the status bar stays red.  More importantly, if I'm in a query editor for a connection without a custom color, and I switch the connection to my production server, the color does not change to red.

Similarly, if I open a new instance of SSMS and click on New Query (or am prompted because my Startup option includes new query window), the status bar remains the default yellowish color, not red.

These gaps in functionality defeat the purpose of the visual cue, and I am hoping that a fix can be addressed in the Denali timeframe.  I wanted to call this one out separately because it can lead to pretty serious errors.

There are two Connect items about this issue; one has been closed as "Won't Fix" and the other (which came earlier!) has yet to see a response from Microsoft.  I'm hoping that with enough steam we can change that: please vote and comment!

Connect #533667 : SSMS Connection Colouring Not Implemented Sensibly

Connect #504418 : [SSMS] Make color coding of query windows work all the time

There are workarounds, of course: always use Registered Servers to launch your query windows, use Mladen's free SSMS Tools Pack, be a lot more careful, etc. etc.  But personally I feel that such a useful built-in feature should be rectified to function reliably.