Agile Database Development

Agile development at MSFT and tid bits about VSTE for DB Pros

This Blog

About
Email

Syndication

Search

Interesting Musings

Photos and Screen Shots

Product and Team Pictures

Intellisense

We continue to hear this message and believe me, we want intellisense in the product. There are 3rd parties that provide this type of functionality in VS today. What I am more interested in is how you want intellisense to work. If you are on a project with (lets keep this small and arbitrary) 100 views and 200 tables and you type select e. what do you want to see in the list? And do you just want the columns, do you want the from Employees e inserted, how about filling in other parts of the query frame like where ... order by ... what about the use of Snippets like in C#/VB?

Published Wednesday, June 14, 2006 9:18 PM by thomas murphy

Comments

# re: Intellisense @ Thursday, June 15, 2006 3:06 AM

As you mentioned, there are 3rd parties doing this already, and Redgate's SQL Prompt is one that I use already.

I guess you guys don't want to stand on the toes of your partners, but replicating what is offered in this offering would be a great start.

Forgive me if I seem greedy, but in Australia we're paying around $9000 for a team edition and $20000 for the suite, and for that sort of money I want a full feature set.

Cheers
Dave

davemoyle

# re: Intellisense @ Saturday, June 17, 2006 7:45 AM

I'm shocked to hear it's not in the product. This should be a feature of the VS2005 TSQL editor, let alone the Team System offering. I believe listing all the available objects is fine since in four keystrokes or less the list will be whittled down considerably. That's really what is called for. It's having to remember the Nth degree that's the problem in databases.

Frankly, MSFT should do an inventory of standard features available to a developer in VS2005 and put Data developers on par with the rest without having to spend $6000 for basic features like source control, refactoring, and especially Intellisense.

Filling in where order by...

VS2005 added support for keywords in intellisense. Why must you reinvent the wheel? These questions have already been vetted for the other languages. I don't see a big difference for DB statements.

kenbrubaker

# re: Intellisense @ Monday, June 26, 2006 12:29 PM

I'll be honest, SQLPrompt's functionality is a pretty good place to start. They handle intellisense pretty well and don't try to load the entire database as soon as you start typing select (good and bad in a way - be nice to have a way to start with a table in that sense, but not sure how that would work.

Functions/procs - being able to pull up a list of the parameters with types hinted would be great. We could then fill those out as needed instead of just pulling an entire list and assigning values to each desired parameter. I've seen some functions/procs with a ton of parameters, of which only a handful are used for any particular call. Being able to pick and choose the desired parameters would be a great help.

Grouping the calls would help contain the lookups. Especially for those projects that may span databases. We have quite a few of those going in our shop - 5 databases, all linked together in various ways.

I look forward to seeing what comes up. I remember being disappointed that this was dropped from SQL Server 2005, but I can understand that everyone's desires will be different for this type of functionality.

-Pete

paschott

# re: Intellisense @ Monday, July 03, 2006 6:28 PM

If I start typing "select", obviously I am going to want one or more tables, and one or more columns from those tables, and joins between the tables, etc, etc.

I know that VSTEFDP will have some concept of the database schema, so why not just pop up a list of tables and let me select the ones I want, to come back to the editor and find it's filled in all of the columns and tables and joins ready for me to edit?

BruceWCassidy

Anonymous comments are disabled