SQL Server Management Studio as Application Platform

Question

Could the SQL Server IDE ever become an application development platform for enterprise applications? In a similar way to the old xBase applications, but, you know, better?

The main reason is that the Management Studio is one of the best “data centric” application I’ve ever used. It has most of the main ingredients for the proposed solutions:

• powerful data manipulation language (SQL :o) )
• good security
• distributed architecture

The main features that it lacks:

• a GUI toolkit: something simple and standard, enterprise applications usually don’t require fancy UIs
• some form of automation (.Net, COM, I really don’t care as long as it works)
• MS Office integration (especially Excel)

So…?

UPDATE:

The question above is a request for feedback on an ideea. I'm not planning to use SSMS to build an interactive application in the near future. I would realy like to hear what do you think about it and what other suggestions you might have (maybe there is already a product which does exactly that).

A shorter text for the question would be "If SSMS and MS Access could marry, how would their child look like?"

2nd UPDATE:

"Microsoft announces its new product codename 'Frankenstein'. The new product tries to combine the ease of development of database applications from the old Fox Pro and Access times, with the brand new SQL Server 2013 suite. As 'Frankenstein's Product Manager, Jim Bob, stated "[Frankenstein] will enable the developers to shut the f*#k up, and just build that thing already. Not spend their (highly remunerated) time arguing what's the best ORM, or AJAX toolkit, or should they use SOA etc... (btw, since 2009, SOA is dead)"

Answer 1

Well it depends on what way you look at it.

You can extend and build plugins for management studio but you can also use the visual studio shell as the base for new applications (altho I don't think this is what you want?)

However re-reading your question it looks like you actually want to build applications for SQL server. In that case you might want to check out Visual Studio Team Systems Database Edition

Answer 2

There's two risks involved with building applications on top of SQL Server Management Studio.

First, SQL Server Management Studio has been fairly consistent from 2005 to 2008, but that's only three years of release time. SQL Server 2000's tools were dramatically different, and there's no reason to expect SQL Server management tools to always remain the same.

For example, at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Summit in Seattle in 2008, Microsoft demoed a new management framework for SQL Server. The databases will be packaged and managed in a way quite different from what we're used to in SSMS. Project Kilimanjaro (think of it as SQL 2008 R2) will be the "down payment" on that management, with the rest of the tools coming in later versions. SSMS will look, feel and work differently in order to accomodate this new way of building database-driven applications.

Second, Microsoft's architecture for SSMS is not pluggable, and they haven't encouraged any third party development inside SSMS that I'm aware of. You can build some level of interactivity by using RDLC reports - standalone SQL Server Reporting Services applications that run inside SSMS - but for the most part, you're not encouraged to build atop SSMS because they do want the right to change it when they need to improve it.

I've got good news, though - you mentioned that you'd want some kind of Office tie-in. Keep your eye out for Project Gemini announcements. Donald Farmer did demos of it at PASS, and there's probably some video circulating around. It uses Excel as a front end for BI analytics, and they used million-row-spreadsheets that were storing data back in SQL. There's not much out out yet for the public, but keep your eyes peeled.

Answer 3

To answer the shorter question - Have you seen the various Frankenstein films?

The longer question - why would you want it to, you already have Visual Studio? SSMS is an excellent environment for developing stored procedures, queries, views and the like, lets leave it that way. And anyhow, the only good XBase environment was FoxPro and look where that ended up.