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If you don't know what IntelliSense is, you're cheating yourself. Big time. IntelliSense is the best programming innovation since coffee. As you begin to type, a hovering menu pops up and gives you a list of every possible choice, which narrows as you continue to type, and to select an item in the menu (while also sending your keystrokes to the editor). When you hit space, enter, dot, comma, a paren, or many others, it completes the word and adds your final keystroke.
Additionally, we have code outlining, so that each query has a - sign to the left of it. Clicking the - hides that query and replaces the - with a +, which unhides it. When you go through a 400 line stored procedure with many component parts, you can process (read, review, etc) one query, then hide it as you move on to the next. To me, this is more important than the auto complete feature.
Further, all errors (syntax, schema, etc) are underlined in red.
There are other advantages, like WMI in the Activity Monitor, showing the CPU, and other key metrics, most expensive queries on the server, and a great deal else in SSMS 2008. All in all, I lost 2 pounds after using the software. I can't recommend it enough.
IntelliSense (including outlining) only works against SQL Server 2008 instances, tho, due to a new data transfer method for this. I'm working against SQL 2005 in production, so I've installed a local, named instance, and write code against a connection to it, then push this back into production as normal.
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