It would be easy and straight forward I thought. You click a button on the menu somewhere and something simple happens. I thought, how hard could it be… it’s just a simple action. BackgroundĪll I wanted was to create a simple SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) extension to simplify what was already a simple action that I repeat a couple of times a week. The process for extending older versions of SSMS should be similar though. Note: This tutorial is created for extending the latest version of SQL Server Management Studio which at the time of this writing is 17.6. If you want to skip my sad story and the reason why I created this tutorial, you can go to the Requirements section and jump straight to the project. It will cover just the basics of setting up your development environment for developing SSMS extensions from scratch. If you don’t know where to begin with creating your own, you’ve come to the right place.

This will be an absolute beginner’s guide on how to get started with creating SQL Server Management Studio 17 (SSMS) extensions. Note: There’s an updated version of this tutorial for SSMS 18 available here.

Microsoft sql server manager studio