Adding Existing Queries and Miscellaneous Files to Source Control in SSMS with MSSCCI

Wow, that title is a mouthful, isn't it? It makes me cringe a little bit that I had to write it!

So, you know what SSMS is, right? SQL Server Management Studio. That's where you write most of your queries. If you've used this product extensively you know that managing your queries can be painful -- you probably rename your query 50 times with some combination of the date or keywords or something similar.

• MyQuery.sql
• MyQuery 2013.12.05.sql
• MyQuery By Week.sql

But if you use TFS (Microsoft's Team Foundation Server), you can quite happily add query projects to source control just like any other development project. 

This post is not about how to set up your source control -- There is a great blog post called Use Team Foundation Server (TFS) as your Source Control in SSMS by Dan Thompson that explains it quite well. It uses an interface called MSSCCI (I'm guessing Microsoft Source Code Control Interface?)

This post is actually about one major oversight in the interface: you can't add existing items, such as SQL files from other locations or query result files that you'd like to keep track of. If you right click on Queries or Miscellaneous you'll notice that you only have the option to create new items. Bummer, right? 

There is a solution. There are actually two. You can either edit the project files manually (not described here) or you can take the easy way out and simply drag and drop your files from a Windows Explorer window.

Awesome, right? Now you have a fairly complete source control solution and you can manage your SQL files and the related miscellaneous files!