While I still use Enterprise Manager with our SQL2000 servers more often, I've had a decent amount of experience with SQL 2005's Management Studio and can offer a few thoughts on it. I also spend a large amount of time developing SSIS packages in VS2005.

In a nutshell, I agree with your take on Management Studio's features, but I think it's overall usability went down a few notches. Granted, that's a subjective thing, but in general, the "number of clicks required to accomplish a given task" factor has gone up.

It also seems that a majority of the UI is wasted... you spend most of your mouse time navigating through the Object Explorer in the left-hand pane eventually pulling up the properties dialog you need while the right-hand pane is mostly redundant/unused. Part of that is the explorer-style interface, but I was really hoping for more "task pad" style screens & forms.

I'm just glad that sorting objects by create-date finally works!

CHRIS9/20/2006 10:20:16 AM