Microsoft had indicated at early points in the product cycle that IntelliSense would be included in the new Query Analyzer / Enterprise Manager replacement, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). However, the technical issues involved with implementing this functionality became overwhelming, and the feature had to be pushed to a future version. One of the main problems, I'm suspecting, is that users expect a list of all possible columns in the entire database when they type "SELECT "... which of course is unreasonable, and arguably useless in larger schemas. In the meantime, Atadore has been developing PromptSQL, a very handy little app that runs mainly in the background, but provides dropdown IntelliSense for local variables, stored procedure names, stored procedure parameters, table names, potential JOIN/ON clauses, and when a FROM is well-formed, potential columns (including alias prefixes, which I was really impressed with).

When I initially downloaded the product and tried it out, I only had the following two gripes, and these issues have been fixed in the most recent build:

(a) EXEC master.dbo. should yield a list of stored procedures in master; only the list of stored procedures in the current database is provided. In fact, any prefixes at all render the IntelliSense non-functional. I have a habit of using the dbo. prefix on all objects, and this will change my approach to that somewhat.

(b) they should give us control over fonts/colors of the dropdown lists (I hate MS Sans Serif).