Introducing the Red Gate SSMS Ecosystem

The Red Gate SSMS Ecosystem is a framework that makes it easy to develop, share and manage SSMS add-ins. We aim to help add-in developers build everything from homegrown solutions and community-driven projects to commercial solutions provided by partner companies. We hope that DBAs and database developers will benefit from better integrated tools.

Red Gate has lots of experience developing tools that integrate with SSMS. Over time, we’ve built a collection of common libraries and APIs that make developing SSMS add-ins much simpler. We’ve made these available free, so developers can build their own SSMS add-ins and integrate them with other tools.

The SSMS Ecosystem is a work in progress. Over time, we’ll be introducing new API features and adding add-ins to our directory. The initial benefit is the ability to integrate your tools with SSMS. In the future, we want to enable add-ins to use more Red Gate technologies and integrate with each other. Eventually, the SSMS Ecosystem will have a distribution platform similar to the Visual Studio Gallery where you can share, discover, and manage add-ins.

Our motivation is partly internal, to help us maintain our product’s codebase and improve collaboration between Red Gate products. It’s also partly external, in that our tools are part of a wider story about developing, delivering, and maintaining software. We believe that our tools are more valuable to our users when they’re flexible and extensible.

If you’d like to write a add-in for the SSMS Ecosystem, visit our developer resources page. If you have any problems or the APIs you need aren’t available, please get in touch.