For the last year and a half I have been using a laptop as my primary development machine. A few weeks ago I got a new desktop and spent a few days installing most of the essentials.
Since then I’ll occasionally be reminded of some tool or utility that I haven’t installed on my new machine yet. This weekend it was SQLPrompt. I only started using SQLPrompt a few months ago when it was released as freeware and I thought it was really neat, but I did not realize how much I had grown to rely on it until a few days ago. I was happily modifying a stored procedure in SQL 2005’s Management Studio when I realized that I was getting no Intellisense support after I typed a table name. It took me a minute to remember that Intellisense was not part of the Management Studio out of the box and that I would need to install SQLPrompt to get it back. Within minutes I was back on track and was able to finish up my stored proc updates without having to look up table names or field names manually.
I think I have just become a lifelong customer of RedGate, specifically of SQLPrompt, especially if they keep the cost down to a reasonable level. What a great marketing decision by them to give it away for free for a while.