One more thing to note on this final point is that extensions developed with Visual Studio 2015 might not work properly on SSMS 18 due to assembly version incompatibilities. Will be using Visual Studio 2017 this time aroundīecause the updated SSMS 18 is now based on the VS 2017 Isolated Shell.Now you just develop your extension and it just works. The SSMS team at Microsoft finally decided to remove the constraint that allowed only extensions with whitelisted package ids to be loaded into SSMS. There’s no more need for the workarounds (rendering half of the previous tutorial completely useless).
If You Already Read the Create Your Own SQL Server Management Studio 17 (SSMS) Extension Tutorial If you read the previous tutorial and just want to catch up on what’s changed, then you should only read the next section covering the differences between developing an extension for the previous version of SSMS and this one. So if you’re new here, you should skip the next section and go to the Background or straight to the Requirements section if you don’t want to be bothered with the reasons why I wrote this tutorial. Even though this is an update, it will cover all the steps again in full so the people who haven’t read that one can still get started with creating their own extensions from this tutorial alone.
It’s sort of an update to the Create Your Own SQL Server Management Studio 17 (SSMS) Extension tutorial and if you’re already familiar with that one, there’s no need to go through this one as well because most of the stuff there still applies. It will cover only the basic setup and steps required to get started.
This will be a step-by-step guide on how to create your own SQL Server Management Studio 18 extension (SSMS from now on).