How do I develop a plug-in for Management Studio?

Recently saw a red-gate product that added an entire menu header to the management studio interface. How does one go about developing that? My company has several SQL related home grown mini utilities written in C# that I've placed in Management Studio for convienience via the external tools functionality. Feedback from our development and database groups indicate that this solution does not go far enough in cleanly simplifying how we leverage our custom utilities. That being the case it would be a great boon to learn how to add an entire menu to the environment as to customize it to our needs. Any information would be a help. Thanks in advance.

My team owns SQL Server Management Studio. In SQL Server 2005, we do not have any publicly documented or supported ways of plugging into Management Studio. We will be rectifying this in future versions of SQL Server. I was at PASS in Seattle, WA this past week and saw Red-Gate's SQL Refactor utility. What they have done is pretty impressive considering we have not made that information public.

In future releases, we will try to follow Visual Studio's plug-in architecture. Once we are confident that our interfaces will not change significantly, we will release that information to the public.

You could file this as a suggestion on Microsoft Connect. We will keep you in the loop as we make decisions throughout the product development lifecycle. http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/.

Paul A. Mestemaker II
Program Manager
Microsoft SQL Server Manageability
http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlrem/