JetBrains ReSharper comes to VS Code, SQL Server 2025 actually looks good
Teds Tech, May 29th 2025
What a week. If you haven’t seen it, I missed some cracking news from MS Build which was released about 3 hours before going to “print” last week - loose C# file execution without a .csproj file. I made a video about it here:
Onto this week’s news:
JetBrains releases ReSharper for VS Code
For veteran developers, the news might bring a wave of nostalgia. ReSharper was, for many, an indispensable part of the C# development experience. The cry of "Please, a ReSharper license!" from a new team member was expected.
I’ve given it a go and you need to disable Microsoft's own C# and C# Dev Kit extensions, as ReSharper apparently prefers to take full command of the C# experience. This in itself signals the potential for a fascinating dynamic in the VS Code tooling space.
Once installed and your solution is loaded (perhaps after the classic ReSharper cache processing warms up, a sight familiar to Visual Studio users), the experience aims to be classic ReSharper. The "ReSharper Solution Explorer" makes an appearance, which basically mirrors the C# Dev Kit Solution Explorer. I had great success with the iconic "Initialize field from constructor" shortcut, a beloved time-saver, and it works just as well as it did in VS.
This move by JetBrains is particularly interesting given Microsoft's recent efforts to monetize the C# experience in VS Code through the C# Dev Kit, which is tied into Visual Studio subscriptions. I do think this will get somehow squashed by MS, there was a reason JetBrains announced in 2021 that they weren’t going to bother.
Relevant Links:
JetBrains ReSharper in VS Code Public Preview Announcement https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2025/05/19/resharper-comes-to-microsoft-visual-studio-code/
ReSharper on the Visual Studio Code Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JetBrains.ReSharper-VSCode
SQL Server 2025 gets decent JSON support
I’ll ignore the AI stuff for this update.
Fascinating to me is the new sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint stored procedure. This has serious potential. For years, reaching out to external web services from within SQL Server has been a clunky affair, often requiring complex CLR assemblies or other workarounds. Now, developers will be able to directly call secure HTTPS REST endpoints (supporting GET, POST, PUT, etc.) from stored procedures, triggers, or functions, and directly process the response. Imagine enriching your data in real-time by calling an external API, or triggering a workflow in another system based on a database event – all natively within SQL Server. Scary.
Complementing this external connectivity is a long-awaited enhancement to JSON support. SQL Server has had rudimentary JSON capabilities for a while – parsing with OPENJSON and formatting with FOR JSON – but it always felt like a bolt-on rather than a first-class citizen. Developers often looked to databases like PostgreSQL for more robust native JSON handling. With SQL Server 2025, that changes. The introduction of a native JSON data type aims to bring SQL Server to feature parity with competitors, allowing for more efficient storage, indexing, and querying of JSON documents directly within the relational database.
When you combine these two features – the ability to call a REST API and get a JSON response, and then store and manipulate that JSON natively – the possibilities are quite exciting, and perhaps a little "scary" in terms of the complex logic that might now reside in the database tier.
The "AI-ready" stuff extends to integrated vector database querying capabilities and other GenAI model integrations and obviously they added GitHub Copilot to the beloved SQL Server Management Studio.
Relevant Links:
Official SQL Server 2025 Public Preview Blog: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2025/05/19/announcing-sql-server-2025-public-preview/
SQL Server 2025 Public Preview Discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SQLServer/comments/1kqfecc/announcing_the_public_preview_of_sql_server_2025/
Windows Update Gets an Update
In a spell of wishful thinking, MS looks like they’ll try to cajole the 1000s of disparate update mechanisms on Windows to all hook into Windows Update.
This sounds like a nightmare to me but you can read more about it on “Introducing a Unified Future for App Updates on Windows” at their blog: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/introducing-a-unified-future-for-app-updates-on-windows/4416354
Thanks for reading and continuing to subscribe. For a video version of this post, check out: