SharePoint Developer Arsenal

When I started with SharePoint 2010 development, I had to turn to net for solutions from time to time on tasks like, writing CAML queries free of syntax errors, SPMetal's limitations in handling certain fields, developing sandboxed visual web parts, accessing SharePoint webservices using jQuery, Powershell scripts et al. While all these searches ended up with a handful of freeware SharePoint utilities, which had substantially improved my productive time. Thanks to those who were generous enough to share their custom solutions with the SharePoint community through CodePlex and Visual Studio Gallery. Here's the list of utilities and libraries, which I believe as must to have for every SharePoint developer.

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools - This tool pack is definitely a complement to the existing set of SharePoint templates shipped with VS.NET 2010. With this power pack, you could develop sandbox solutions using visual webpart instead of the standard Webpart (non-visual). This tool pack shows you errors during compilation phase itself, while trying to access a class or a method restricted in a sandbox environment. This feature however is accessible if you refer the SharePoint assemblies located in  {SharePointRoot}\UserCode\assemblies\Microsoft.SharePoint.dll

Community Kit for SharePoint - I would say this is the best utility for SharePoint 2010 developers available in CodePlex. With version 2.0, new features has been incorporated like WSPBuilder conversion tool (WCT), Creating webparts with Contextual behavior and many more. 

Flash(FLV) Video Player webpart - If you are searching for a webpart to play  those FLV formats on the browser, then this one should fit the bill. This webpart uses an opensource flash video player to play the FLV files.

SharePoint Manager 2010 (SPM) -  An object model explorer for your SharePoint site. This one is a great time saver when compared to Central Admin as this helps you to easily navigate to the object you are looking for with few clicks. It gives you much better view of the AppPool and IIS settings. You could even view things like items in the sites recycle bin, quota settings and more. A hearty thanks to the author 'CARSTEN KEUTMANN' for contributing such a great tool.

Useful Custom Workflow Activities - This tool pack provides a set of predefined custom workflow actives like Sending EMail with HTTP attachments, User Info Lookup and more. At the time of writing a new workflow activity named 'Send EMail Extended' was released, which gives you the option to specify the senders email address while sending out emails, isn't that cool?

ILoveSharePoint - A collection of utilities for SP 2007 and SP2010. This pack provides webpart for executing PowerShell scripts from the web UI.

SPServices - Ever had to call a SharePoint webservice from Javascript\JQuery? If yes, then this is the right tool for the job. The SPService is a jQuery library acting as a wrapper for the Sharepoint webservices. The best part with this library is that, it is pretty well documented with samples.

PowerShell Heaven - SPoshMod an easy to use PowerShell wrapper scripts for developers and admins. PowerShell script snippets used by admins and developers for their day to day tasks like IIS manangement, farm management, solution deployment etc. 

SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack - Forms based authentication pack for SharePoint 2010. This includes web parts for registering users, changing passwords and password recovery. It includes tools for managing users and roles and for approving registrations. 

Fusion Charts for SharePoint -  A set of charts for presenting data in 2D and 3D representations. The supported chart types include, bar charts, pie charts, area charts, stacked charts, line charts and more. The chart uses XML format as input and supports data export functionality in CSV and XML formats. Here's a step by step instruction on how to install for SharePoint 2010.

ULSLog Viewer - A log viewer for viewing Sharepoint logs contained in the SharePoint Root\Logs. Incidentally there's another ULSLogViewer from Microsoft too, which provide similar functionality.

LINQ to SharePoint DSL Extension for Visual Studio 2010 - An enhanced library for generating and mapping entities for using with LINQ to SharePoint.

CAML Intellisense - Memorizing CAML structs\syntax is not a big deal, but getting intellisense support is going make the life easier for any SharePoint developer. The good news is that, this package provides rich support while writing CAML queries along with small description on what the method\property is all about.

Click here to browse through all of the SharePoint projects hosted at CodePlex. You can also browse through the solutions hosted at "Visual Studio gallery" targeted towards SharePoint developers.

.NET Decompilers

I was a hardcore fan of .NET Reflector; but the moment Red-Gate acquired and commercialized .NET Reflector, I had to look for alternatives, but couldn't find anything similar at that time. Meanwhile Red-Gate trying to save their face recently announced in their forum, those using Reflector 6 wont be forced to upgrade to the latest version of the .NET Reflector, this means developers sticking with the freeware version wont have access to the bug fixes as well as to new features introduced with the future versions of .NET Reflector.

In the mean time, .NET open source community(SharpDevelop) had kick started a new project as an alternative to .NET Reflector under the title ILSpy. The best thing with ILSpy is that, first of all its open source and the source code is available for you to download and study or to contribute. The short coming I came to notice with ILSpy was that, unlike .NET Reflector it lacks those rich plugins which were available with .NET Reflector. I believe these short comings is going to be filled up by the community, in the upcoming versions of ILSpy. Here's a video demonstrating the features available in ILSpy.

(To watch this video in Youtube, right-click the video and select 'Watch on Youtube')

There's a good news for Re-sharper 6 users. Jet brains is shipping an integrated .NET decompiler, which provides similar kind of functionality by .NET Reflector Pro, also there's a good news for non-resharper users. Jet brains is giving out a standalone version of their decompiler as freeware, you can downloaded the freeware version of the decompiler from here.

I think the acquisition of .NET Reflector by Red-Gate in fact had opened the doors for  the open source community to come up with ILSpy, which I believe is going to evolve as a robust product at a faster pace than .NET Reflector, the prime reason being its open source. I request you to provide your valuable feedback and suggestions on ILSpy in their forum. 

The efficient way to share code snippets

Being a developer its not unusual to find yourself mailing code snippets to your colleagues or friends who might have rang up for help with their coding chores. So after Googling or trying out some samples you might straight away mail him the code, which is perfectly  acceptable at that point of time. 

Me too was doing the same thing while sending code snippets to my friends. One fine day, I encountered the same scenario which I had happened to solve for a friend of mine some weeks back. I remember the code was around 100 plus LOC with some hex values and bitwise ops. I was reluctant to code that again so I started searching in my send mail items, unfortunately I had deleted that mail from my send items as well as from the outlook recycle-bin; to make matters worse, calling my friend to whom I had send the mail was not reachable. It was like Murphy's law in action, after which I had to reinvent the wheel by coding all those again from scratch.

So as to find a solution to this, I turned to Google which ended up with Gist a handy feature crafted for the very same purpose by GitHub. The best thing with Gist is that its free and you could share the code snippets by sending the hyperlink to your friends. Before sharing your code snippets, create an account for yourself so that you can come back and see those code snippets shared by you; not only that the code snippets shared using Gist is indexed by search engines, which might help others too from reinventing the wheel.

Click here to visit the site

Good News for .NET Reflector Users

The good news is that, Red-Gate had bowed down to the developer community request by making .NET Reflector v6 available free of cost. It was a sigh of relief, when I came to read about this in their forum. 

If you have ever used this tool for debugging applications, I would say this is something which any ace .NET developer couldn't live without. It is that crucial from a developers point of view, especially while trying to pin point the root cause of hard to find bugs.

While the bad news is that, Red-Gate has released .NET Reflector v7 with lot of enhancements and bug fixes. For those sticking with the v6 is going to miss all those goodies packed with the new commercial version. 

I was thinking, if the productivity gain from using .NET Reflection is that good, then why not shell out some bucks to get a copy for myself as its only 30$ per dev box. Seems like marketing guys had priced it appropriately to get us hooked. 

Anyhow lets hope, one day Red-Gate is going to make .NET Reflector available as free download, once they recover the expenses incurred in acquiring the tool from Lutz Roeder's. Till then happy debugging...

Opening Excel Files In Different Windows

Today a friend of mine rang me up to check whether, is there any way to open excel files in different windows, rather than getting the files opened in the same application window, which was excel's default behavior. My friend is having a system with dual monitor and was trying to open excel files in both the monitors, unfortunately both the files were getting open in the same excel main window, and all attempts to drag files from the main excel window to the secondary monitor didn't succeed.

I did went through the options in excel, but unfortunately no setting could be found to get this done. I thought this should not be an odd case, as this might have been faced by others too, so why not search and see if there is some solutions out there in the net. After going through a couple of solutions, I found the one which I was looking for. Some additional steps were required to get this done, which wasn't mentioned there in the solution. So I though of documenting the solution, so as to benefit others if the need arises.

I came to find two solutions for this. First one is dam simple, but a temporary solution. While the second one is what I recommend. So lets start with the simple one.

1. Open Excel application.
2. Drag the file you wish to open to excel application.
3. To open the second file, open a new excel instance, i.e. open excel from start menu or by typing "excel" in start-> run dialog. (don't forget exclude the quotes while entering command in run dialog)
4. Drag the file you wish to open to this new instance of excel application. Thats it, now you have two instances of excel application which you could drag around multiple monitors as you wish.

Now lets move on to the second solution, the one I would recommend for power users.

Assumptions: Microsoft Excel 2007 or above running on windows XP (The settings locations might be different in case of Windows 7, but the solution should work with both Vista and Win7).

1. Open Windows explorer. (Press Win + E key combination or open "My Computer")
2. Open "Folder Options" from "Tools-> Folder Options"
3. Select tab "File Types"
4. Inside "Registered File Types" search for "XLSX" under "Extensions" column (Excel file extension for formats from 2007 onwards)
5. Make sure you had selected "XLSX" under "Extensions" column.
6. Click "Advanced" button. A new window with the title "Edit File Type" should open up.
7. Un-check "Browse in same window" if checked.
8. Under "Actions" list select "Open" (The text highlighted in bold).
9. Click "Edit" button.
10. A new window with the title "Editing action for type: Microsoft Office Excel Worksheet" should open up.
11. In the textbox labeled "Application used to perform action", update the text to the following. Note: Append the text /e "%1" after the excel path. Now it should look like the one below except for the path to Excel.exe
    "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE" /e "%1"
12. Uncheck the "Use  DDE" checkbox.
13. Click "OK" button to close the window.
14. Click "OK" button in the "Edit File Type" window.
15. Now execute the steps from 5 to 14 by selecting "XLS" file extension.

After making all these changes close any open excel documents and try opening two excel files. Now you should see those two files opened up in two different windows.

Developers Arsenal

For the first time when I got myself a personal computer, I was under the impression that, what ever application I require was prepackaged with the OS. But soon I came to realize that, things didn't look as rosy as I thought of.


This made me to narrow down my search for applications. which were specifically tagged as "Freeware". So by this time, I had a pretty rich collection of freeware applications ranging all the from mere arcade games to EXE Packers, kernel debuggers and disassemblers. The list what i have in mind is pretty exhaustive, which could take some time to get all of them listed here. Anyhow I am starting off with what I could recall off the top of my head and don't get turned down by this minuscule list as of now. I will be constantly updating this space with more and more freeware applications, so keep watching.

Desktop Notes - When coming to sticky notes application for windows desktop, the one I prefer is "PNotes". Its simple yet hight configurable opensource freeware application written in C and Win32API, which gives lightning fast performance. PNotes allows you to pin notes and reminders,  to your desktop. There is provision to customize the notes like applying skins, password, transparency. Finally this one requires no installation at all.

World Time - If you had ever worked with teams who are in a different timezone, then definitely you would have wished for an application to get their local times listed on your desktop. QClock a freeware application, which has a pretty huge list of timezone listing all over from the world.

ZoomIt - Have you ever found it difficult to read small texts on you desktop? If yes, definitely this is the perfect freeware application which allows you to zoom into that particular area. This application has even some pretty cool features like you could draw on your screen while doing presentations.

Image Resize - Why is it taking so long to upload\view the photos taken from my camera? Have you ever asked this yourself while trying to upload\view pictures to Facebook or other social networking sites? . If yes, definitely this one is the real answer to internet friendly images. Usually the images from your Digital cam might be around 3-5MB in size, which is pretty huge for internet connections with moderate bandwidth. The "Microsoft Image Resize" will bring down this huge files to below 100KB, without any noticeable degradation in image quality. Once installed you could right click the images you want to shrink and select "Resize Pictures" from the context menu. (If you are using Windows7 this wont work, instead you can go for a similar kind of utility from Codeplex which is available for both 32 and 64 bit platforms as well. Click here to download)

SiteToPhone - Ever wished to send URLs to your mobile from your desktop browser? The SiteToPhone.com provides exactly this and that too without any complicated registration. This application required no login at all. Just visit the site, click "Create an ID" email the generated URL to your mobile and bookmark it. Next time when ever you need to send any link to your mobile, use the SiteToPhone browser plugin to pass on this URL of choice to your mobile.


Startup Programs - Autoruns a freeware powerful startup program management utility from Sysinternals, lists out an exhaustive list of applications, DLLs, plugins, drivers which gets loaded during windows bootup and while user login. The application neatly groups up all those startup modules into different tabs for easy viewing and moreover it provides online search facility to identify unknown startup applications. Whats more catchy is with this application is that, it even lists out windows services which doesn't show up in the Windows services console (services.msc).


Multi-Monitor - When I got my secondary monitor for my workstation, I felt a bit uneasy while moving applications(windows) between monitors, at the same time the taskbar too didn't show up on my secondary monitor which was quite strange. After Googling, I found light at end of the tunnel, with the Multimon utility. Multimon provides extended taskbar support for additional monitors and this cool utility comes in two different versions freeware and shareware. The freeware version will definitely meet the basic requirement of getting the taskbar support extended to secondary and third monitor if any. In addition to the extended taskbar, it provides window switch functionality through buttons placed on the title bar of each window. You could also use the shortcut key to switch applications between monitors, which I find myself using most of the time. Use Ctrl + Alt + -> to switch the current active window to the right monitor and Ctrl + Alt + <- to switch applications to the left one.


File Unlocker - Its not unusual for a windows user to get messages like "File in use. Access denied", while trying to delete, move or rename files or directories. Unlocker a shell based utility comes to the rescue. Once installed, you will find a new entry named "Unlocker" when ever you right-click a file, selecting this will bring up a list of applications or processes which had locked this file. You either kill those processes or unlock the handles by clicking on appropriate options.


Process Explorer - This is the best ever freeware utility from SysInternals, I had used to manage processes running on my system. This one is packed with tons of features, which definitely is far ahead and powerful than the Microsoft TaskManager. This application throws out tons of details for a given process, which definitely assists in debugging a lot many issues involving handles, permissions\security, modules etc. I love this application especially its process suspend capability, which is badly missing in Microsoft TaskManager. This I recommend as a must to have tool for every windows user.


Hash\Checksum Extension - Whenever you download or upload file over internet, how can you guarantee that the file you uploaded\downloaded was received intact at the other end?, i.e without any data loss or data corruption. In such scenarios the hashing algorithm comes to rescue. The hash algorithms generate a unique signature against the file you wish to verify. So when ever you host a file in an HTTP\FTP site, always upload the hash signature of that file along with. This helps those downloading the file, to verify the integrity of the downloaded file by generating the hash value of the downloaded file against the hash value provided there in the server. The HashChecksum extension discussed here, adds a new tab named "Checksums" to the file properties dialog, here you will find checksum values generated for the given file using different algorithms like, CRC-32, MD4, MD5, SHA-1.


Notepad++ - If you have ever worked with Microsoft Notepad, definitely you would have asked for something better. After stepping  into development, my search for a better text editor ended up with Notepad++. Now for the past 4 years this is my preferred text editor of choice, which comes with a whole lot of features and that too with a small memory footprint unlike other Microsoft products. There's a whole lot of of features like Color coding\ Syntax highlighting for almost all the programming languages under the sun.Then you could zoom into the document if text seems difficult to read and moreover it has a tabbed interface which shows up last active\opened documents each time whenever the application is triggered. If you want to try out some popular opensource text editors here's a selected few from my archive. Notepad2, Programmers Notepad.


Audacity - This is a must to have utility, if you want to do basic audio editing or recording kind of stuff. I was using this utility to record audio from skype. The coolest thing about this application is that its opensource as well as free.


Tamper IE: Some time back while executing a web project for Dept. of Defense, our application was put to security test, which uncovered a pretty long list of vulnerabilities. While going through their test cases, one thing which caught my attention was on tampering data after form submission, i.e. after all validations. The tool they had used for this was a free IE add-on utility called Tamper IE, with which you could alter the data posted from browsers.


DM2: This is pretty cool utility with which you could make certain windows stay on top of all other windows or move some applications to system tray or even make those transparent and change there process priority by simply right-clicking the title bar or its corresponding task bar icon. The feature which I love the most is the WinEnable plugin; this is almost like an hackers tool, with which you could enable most of the disabled controls in any application, just by hovering the mouse over it. Theres a lot more you could accomplish with the plugins packed along with. I am leaving this for you to try it yourself.


Recuva - Have you ever been in a situation, where by chance you deleted some important files which and was running from pillar to post to get those recovered? If yes then this is the right tool to get yourself out from the nerve breaking situation in any time in future. This is a free file recovery tool from Piriform with a pretty good list of options to get your file back. A small tip in case you find yourself in a situation where you had accidently deleted a file. Keep you computer as it is, never try yo open or close any running programs or files, which could overwrite the deleted file sectors. If any Instant messaging apps or email clients are running exit those by going to task manager and killing the process, this may seem like a contradictory statement to what I mentioned above. The reason why is that, the IM could write out chat logs if some one pops in at that moment and email clients could pull mails from the server which might cause overwrite issues. So as to avoid this its safe to kill the process rather than exiting the normal way.


System Information: If you need to get a detailed inventory of your computer like details of processor, motherboard, RAM, HDD, Graphics Card etc. There are a couple of free utilities out there in the internet, but the best among which I came to find was the one from Piriform called Speccy , CPUZ and Belarc Advisor


Process Terminator: There are times when process like antivirus background scanners which might be slowing down your computer or some unknown processes which you might not be able to terminate at all. In most of these cases Task manager might be of no use, because it will simply show an access denied or failed message when ever your try to terminate such processes. As a solution to this i came to find these two freeware utilities namely Process Explorer with which you could terminate most of the process, if not you could at least suspend them(the safe bet, I would say), which is like pressing the pause button for the selected process. Next is the ultimate one, the Process Hacker. I had seen this one terminating most of the processes even which Process Explorer had failed to terminate. Process hacker presents the user with a list of options to be executed against the process which is to be terminated.


Wire Shark (Network Analyzer): For those developing network apps and doing security analysis, this is a must to have tool in your arsenal. This one captures the network traffic flowing through the system NIC and presents in a clean UI. It could even capture VOIP and media traffic. Wireshark's native network trace file format is the libpcap format supported by libpcap and WinPcap. The best part of this application is that, its Opensource and freeware.


Widows API Monitor - Have you ever been in a situation where you had to list out specific Win32 APIs called by a windows application? Hopefully not in most development scenarios. But chances are there you might have looking for this, especially if your were to unlock a trial version of  the software or trying to uncover a hard to find bug in any third party apps. This small utility which could hook to the application of choice and capture all the API calls made. This is a must to have application if you want to do some hacking kind of stuff and also not to mention use this wisely.


Dependecy Walker - If you had done COM development then definitely you might had nightmare with missing modules during deployment. This is pretty cool utility with shell integration, which could be used  for troubleshooting system errors related to loading and executing modules. Dependency Walker detects many common application problems such as missing modules, invalid modules, import/export mismatches, circular dependency errors, mismatched machine types of modules, and module initialization failures. The utility works for both 32-bit and 64-bit windows modules and moreover this is freeware.


MagicISO - This freeware utility is capable of mounting virtual DVD\CD drives in your machine. This little application sits in the system tray, from where you could manage all the virtual drives and mounting\unmounting operations.


CamStudio Screen Recorder - If you are planning to do some screen recording for preparing a demo of your product or whatever, this freeware utility will meet most of the basic screen recording needs.


German Dictionary - My search for a free Desktop based German - English dictionary came to end, after finding this cool freeware application called LingoPad. This application sits in your system tray and provides both German to English and English to German translations. The best feature I really love is the "Clipboard watcher" this feature monitors your clipboard for copied texts and provides the German translation, so one no longer need not type in those grueling Deutsch words containing the umlauts.


Virtual Floppy Disk Drive - Nowadays floppy drives are no more seen in any present day computers, even if they were there, chances are that you will find most of them as defective. I came across a situation where I had to download some drivers which had to be loaded to a floppy disk and accessed. I don't know why they did it like that. So this cool free ware utility came to the rescue. This one installs a device driver in XP and creates a virtual FDD in either RAM or in a disk file.


TeamViewer - This is the simple tool I had used to remotely troubleshoot computers over internet. This tool offers you a remote desktop kind of experience to remotely manage others desktop. The beauty of this is, no installation is needed and renders remote screens without considerable time lag even with low bandwidth connections. The only downside wit this one is, a person should be available on the other end in order to establish a link.


LogMeIn - Ever faced the situation, where you had to remotely login to your office machine to get some files?. If yes this is the best solution to get your machines accessible from a browser. The only requirement is that, the machine which your trying to reach remotely should be left turned on.


Windows Grep -  Ever faced with the task of searching a specific string in a set of files\folders? If yes, you know how difficult it is especially with windows search. The Windows Grep a freeware tool provides you with power and flexibility of traditional command line grep utilities available on DOS, UNIX and other platforms with the ease of use of Microsoft Windows. You could even preview the file contents that match your search string.


In case the developer tool you were looking for isn't listed over here, then here's a link from Scott Hanselman's "Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List", with links to tons of developer tools. I would say this is a must to visit link, if you happen to be a web developer.

Active Desktop Recovery

If you ever happened to encounter the "Active Desktop Recovery" screen on your desktop, which itself is annoying. To make matters worse clicking on "Restore Active Desktop Recovery" won't make any difference. As the issue started to pop up regularly, I thought of documenting the solution.

Before reading on, make sure you have registry access permissions, as most of the steps involves some registry tweaks here and there. So lets move on the solution. 


The following solution worked for me, which I believe should definitely work for you too. 


Step 1:
Delete "Desktop.htt"


1. Key in "." (period without quotes) to the "Start->Run" window.
2. The "Documents and Settings" folder of user login should open up.
3. From there navigate to "\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer"
4. Delete "Desktop.htt". If you couldn't find the file, make sure "Show hidden files" is turned on.
5. Refresh the desktop. If the error still persists, move on to Step 2.


Step 2: (Before proceeding, make a backup of the registry keys you are about to alter.)
Modify "SafeMode" registry key.
1. Open Registry.
2. Navigate to "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\SafeMode\Components"
3. Change the DeskHTMLVersion key from 272 to 0 and reboot. The original desktop should now be back.
4. If the error still persists, move on to Step 3.


Step 3: (Before proceeding, make a backup of the registry keys you are about to alter.)

1. Open Registry.

2. Navigate to "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\SafeMode\General"

3. Delete the value in "Wallpaper" key, which will be "%SystemRoot%\Web\SafeMode.htt".

2. Navigate to "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\General"

3. Delete the value in "BackupWallpaper" key. 

4. If the error still persists, move on to Step 4.

Step 4:

1. I am out of options, please post your issue with Stackoverflow, Experts-Exchange or Windows forums or with Bytes.

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World Time

If you are developer or accounts manager working for a remote client in a different timezone, definitely you need to know their local time before making a call or scheduling a meeting over the web. As a solution to this, most company's put up wall clocks, displaying local time of their clients, which is pretty elegant solution. 

But what if you want to know beforehand the local time of your acquaintances who are geographically located? The solution comes right to you desktop under the title QClock, a freeware desktop based application. The application lists timezones from cities all around the world, which itself is a pretty good list of major cities to choose from.

Here is a screenshot of QClock on my Desktop

SQL Intellisense

With the launch of SQL Server 2008 Management Studio (SSMS) a pretty sought after feature the "Intellisense" is now a built-in feature shipped with the editor. The feature dramatically improves the productivity by providing a auto complete list of table names after keying in the "FROM" keyword, similarly you will get a list of relevant column names after the "WHERE" clause. I really adore this feature; because most of the time either the table or column names are abbreviated which introduces a lot of typo as you keyin those SQL statements. 

I was glad to see this Intellisense feature and decided to try it out. After downloading the installation took more time than expected, I fired up the Management Studio but to my shock, i couldn't find the Intellisense in action. After going through forums i came to realize that, this feature works only with SQL Server 2008 server and not with down-version systems (like SQLServer 2005, 2000), but unfortunately at the time of this writing i was using SQL Server 2005 server, which doomed my expectations to get a preview of this very sought after feature. 

After a brief search, I came to find similar products offering the same feature; independent of SQL Server version. The first one that caught my attention was Red-Gate's SQLPrompt which provided Intellisense feature for SQL Management Studio regardless of SQL Server version. I was very much impressed by its features after going through its trial version, I really recommend it as a must to have productivity tool for any developer working with databases, but what made be pull back was its quite hefty price tag, for personal use. 

Later i stumbled upon a free product named "Toad for SQLServer", after the installation i was really impressed by what it had to offer. Its packed with features, much more than i expected. I am enumerating the features shipped with this freeware.

• SQL Intellisense
• Data Export Wizard
• Code Snippets
• Auto Correct for misspelled SQL keywords.
• SQL Syntax Templates
• SQL Execution Plan
• Results Windows - Assists in Grouping, Sorting, Filtering.
• Moreover this freeware version won't get expired as Toad Oracle Freeware does.

Click here to download Toad for SQLServer

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