Connect Digest : 2011-03-26
This week I have collected five important bugs involving Management Studio, and I hope you'll visit them, provide input and vote on the ones you think are worthwhile.
#651176 : SSMS tries to access disconnected network drives when in the Save File As wizard
Paul Randal (blog | twitter) filed this issue when he experienced significant delays trying to save files from SSMS. The issue: SSMS is spinning its wheels trying to access drives that are currently disconnected. I have seen this issue before, but did not put two and two together at the time. Surely it would be easy enough for Management Studio to poll the properties of all of the drives known to Windows, and only pay any attention to the drives that are online and accessible.
#557402 : SSMS : Can no longer create or edit job steps
This is one of mine that I filed last May – when editing a job step, you may find that the dialog raises a very non-user-friendly error about some IClassFactory, and the only workaround so far (other than modifying all of your jobs with T-SQL) is to close Management Studio and start over. Microsoft originally claimed this was fixed two cumulative updates ago, but many people have confirmed that even the most recent CU for SQL Server 2008 R2 does not resolve the issue. This time for sure?
Michael Swart (blog | twitter) raised this issue in 2008, and it remains in limbo. Personally I think it stands to reason that, as the use of schemas becomes more commonplace, the tools should support them better. In this case, I am not sure that Alt+F1 should be connected directly to sp_help, since Microsoft has already committed to not extending the sp_ procedures for new functionality. But give us an easy way to map F1 or Alt+F1 to some kind of query that *will* give us information about the object in question.
#614130 : IntelliSense doesn't work with CAST
Simon Sabin (twitter) filed this complaint last year, and I wholeheartedly agree. IntelliSense is a mere annoyance in general, and I usually shut it off after any tangible amount of coding; but when it starts pulling this nonsense, I'm ready to throw it out the window entirely. Simon's complaint here is specifically with CAST – when you type "CAST(col AS " it auto-completes with the weirdest stuff you could imagine, and doesn't even offer you valid data types. Now, I'm not going to sugar-coat this: there are a LOT of things to fix with IntelliSense, but I can only pimp so many – and we can only expect so many to be fixed in any reasonable development cycle. Maybe I'll dedicate a future digest to IntelliSense? In the meantime, you may be better off with RedGate's SQLPrompt or the free dbForge SQL Complete Express.
#124842 : 'Remember Password' option is not remembered in Registered Server Properties
David Kean filed this back in 2005, and it's a bug I'm sure we've all experienced. Yes, you can overcome it temporarily with a workaround (delete the SqlStudio.bin file), but this is tedious and may affect other settings as well. Also, this workaround will no longer be valid in the Denali timeframe, since Management Studio is now actually just an extension of the official Visual Studio shell. I filed a related bug, #339592, and Joseph Leathlean filed one about duplicate entries in the connection dialog, #373794. Both are still active; the latter is still very much an issue in Denali:
