Wonder Twin Powers, Activate!

Every once in a while, two very different things will come together to produce something new, something unexpected, something awesome. Take these two guys that I know. One, a complete nerd, was bitten by a spider, and now spends his nights running around the city in tights, slinging strands of sticky goo all over the place. The other dude, also a nerd, who has always had a bit of a temper, got too close to the microwave or something, and now whenever he gets mad, turns into a muscular green no-nonsense kinda guy.

I recently had my own "coming together" experience, sadly nothing like these guys, I'm still a nerd, I don't turn green, and I refuse to wear tights. I did, however, develop a new ability through this experience - I can teleport, through time AND space! Ok, not me exactly, but I can teleport my work from one place and time to another. Seriously! By combining the teleportation powers of Dropbox with the time-travelling abilities of SSMS Tools Pack, I can leap from my current location to any other, and even backwards in time, to recover a SQL query or Management Studio session that I previously ran. This is an incredible new power!

My memory's not the greatest, inhibited by "shiny thing" syndrome and the ravages of age. There are often days where I leave work unfinished, intending to pick up where I left off the next day. To help remind myself of what I was doing and where I stopped, I'll leave Management Studio open on my laptop, put the laptop into sleep mode, and head home. Next morning, I simply wake the laptop up and pick up where I stopped the day before. This works well enough, but what happens if the laptop battery dies, or the laptop refuses to wake up? What if I want to continue working on my home machine, or on the "machine under the desk" that I have at work? Thanks to my new powers, these are no longer problems for me.

The first piece of this is Dropbox. If you're not using it, you're missing out. Prior to discovering my new ability, I was using Dropbox for all sorts of things. All of my utility scripts are in there, some eBooks, backups of my Android phone, lots of things. Start using it - you won't be sorry.

The second piece is the SSMS Tools Pack, developed by Mladen Prajdic. This is a tool that extends Management Studio to do some very cool things. In particular, it automatically saves your Management Studio sessions and tabs, at regular intervals, making it possible to retrieve virtually any past query or session that you've run in Management Studio. By combining this capability, with the synching that Dropbox offers, those past sessions and queries can now be accessed from any machine on which you're running Dropbox. Pure genius!

Assuming that you have both Dropbox and SSMS Tools Pack installed, a simple configuration change is all that is needed to inherity my unique space/time-traveling ability:

Soon you'll see an SSMSTools folder appear in your Dropbox. Make the same configuration change on your other workstations, and you now have integrated tab and session synchronization, across workstations!