Mladen Prajdic (Blog|Twitter) recently announced that the newest version of SSMS Tools Pack is coming out and I am excited.

Why am I excited?

Well, I am glad you asked.

I am excited because it will allow me to define my window colors in SQL Management Studio using regular expressions rather than having to define them each individually.

Why is that such a big deal?

I have 100s of servers and I am constantly adding new servers while decommissioning old ones. The sheer amount of changes that would have to be made manually has always kept me from being able to take advantage of window coloring. Rather than have 100s of rules I now have less than 10 regular expressions that cover all of my servers. Here, check it out:

Naming convention changed to protect the employed.

So is that all the SSMS Tools Pack does is color windows?

No, not at all. The SSMS Tools Pack is a large suite of plug-ins for SQL Management Studio available as a free download. There are several features that I cannot live without. My favorite feature is that it can be configured to keep a journal of all queries you have run. This can be especially useful if you work in an environment where a sys admin can push updates that cause your machine to reboot whenever they feel like it. If you are not familiar with all of the features currently in the product then please go check out the list here.

If you have not tried out the SSMS Tools Pack then I highly suggest you give version 1.9 a whirl. I know I will.