Developing Addins for SSMS 2008

There are few good articles if you are interested in developing addins for SQL Server Management Studio 2005.

Basically the concepts are similar to writing an addin for Visual Studio. I linked two sites that deal with addins for SSMS 2005.
http://aspalliance.com/1374_Extend_Functionality_in_SQL_Server_2005_Management_Studio_with_Addins.all
http://jcooney.net/archive/2007/11/26/55358.aspx\

Even when SQL Server Management Studio 2008 CTP had been released, the development concepts for addins remained unchanged to those in SSMS 2005.

Surprisingly the final release of SSMS 2008 brought some significant changes to the addin interface. However, there is no need to panic if you have written an addin for SSMS 2005 and you now want to run it in SSMS 2008. Although the changes Microsoft made will break your addin, the work needed to reanimate it is kept to a minimum:

If you try running your SSMS 2005 addin in SSMS 2008 for the first time it will fail with a typecast exception.
Let’s take a look at the OnConnect-Method in your Connect class, where you typically stored a reference to the DTE2-Application object.

public class Connect : IDTExtensibility2
{
        private DTE2 _applicationObject;
        private AddIn _addInInstance;
 
        public void OnConnection(object application, ext_ConnectMode connectMode, object addInInst, ref Array custom)
        {
                _applicationObject = (DTE2)application;
                _addInInstance = (AddIn)addInInst;
 
                // do something with the application, e.g. reference the Commands
               Commands2 commands = (Commands2)_applicationObject.Commands
        }
}

As you run this code in SSMS 2008, the typecast exception will occur in Line 8.
So what now? We need the Application reference to create toolbar items or windows. The application-object we get in SSMS 2008 is simply void, there are no properties, no methods, no implemented interface: just empty?!?!

This is a problem, but will not break our necks! One more time Reflector saves our lives: Using Reflector I figured that ServiceCache now has a new static property called ExtensibilityModel.
And this property provides all the functionality we formerly knew from the application object.

Now to convert your addin from SSMS 2005 to SSMS 2008, simply change the application-object calls to ServiceCache.ExtensibilityModel and it will work:

public class Connect : IDTExtensibility2, IDTCommandTarget
{
        private AddIn _addInInstance = null;
 
        public void OnConnection(object application, ext_ConnectMode connectMode, object addInInst, ref Array custom)
        {
                _addInInstance = (AddIn)addInInst;
 
                // do something with the commands
                Commands2 commands = (Commands2)ServiceCache.ExtensibilityModel.Commands;
        }
}

Although Microsoft changed the addin model to make our lives harder, we will still be able to develop useful addins for SQL Server Management Studio 2008.

Find some nice addins on my codeplex project SSMSAddins: http://www.codeplex.com/SSMSAddins.

Eine Antwort zu “Developing Addins for SSMS 2008”

1. ojgen sagt:

   18. November 2008 um 21:48

   Good article! Thank You.