[fooey]

I would say Microsoft's dev tools have always been best in the business, but only in their ecosystem and only for their ecosystem. A big part of the reason I still go out of my way to use MS SQL is how good SQL Studio is.

The revolution with VSCode is the openness, not the quality.

[mrec]

Out of interest, have you ever used Jetbrains products like IntelliJ IDEA and friends? Even back when I was writing C#, years ago, Visual Studio was way less productive without their ReSharper plugin.

[WorldMaker]

I'm sure it's a "too each their own" feeling.

Personally, I've never seen Visual Studio so unproductive as with ReSharper installed. The number of colleagues over the years I've had to work to convince them to remove or disable ReSharper to get any work done on projects has been too many. ("I hate Visual Studio because it is too slow." "Do you have ReSharper installed? What happens when you disable it?" "Wow, Visual Studio is really fast now." Surprise.) I've had employers install it by default, I didn't like using it, and I made sure that my employer wasn't paying for a license directly for me when I uninstalled it.

If Android Studio is any indication, I don't see what the fuss is about IntelliJ either. But some of that is certainly just lack of familiarity because I only open up Android Studio when I have to.

[mrec]

It may just be that my experience was a good while back and VS has improved since then. At the time the built-in static analysis really wasn't up to scratch.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I’ve been happy doing most tasks in MySQL Workbench that I can do with SSMS.

Oddly, when using SQL Azure instead of on-prem SQL Server, SSMS doesn’t let you use its friendly hand-holding dialogs but instead drops you into a new editor document with cryptic syntax.

The only excuse I can think of is that the user-friendly popups are single-threaded and block window-messages on network IO and would have a very poor UX due to due the chatty TDS protocol.

[WorldMaker]

It does sound like SQL Server and SSMS have some very interesting choices in remoting models, based on what I've read of Azure Data Studio's development.

Azure Data Studio's the VS Code-based SSMS-like tool focused on Azure SQL and Cosmos DB. At one point the development blog was talking about it as if Azure Data Studio might some day be the eventual replacement for even SSMS itself, but they seem to have walked that back, at least in part due to how many crazy things SSMS does and how SSMS is one of those tools that certain types of users would possibly go into some sort of costly meltdown if their cheese moved.