Starting in 2016 SQL Server Management Studio got its own team at Microsoft and after many years of very little improvement we are starting to see some pretty consistent releases.

They just recently released SSMS 17.1.  It is compatible with and lets you connect to and manage SQL 2008 and forward, including azure.

If you tried version 17.0 you may have experienced the issue outlined in SSMS 2017 CTP2 is not compatible with VS 2013

which prevented your SSDT projects from loading correctly.

This issue is reportedly addressed in 17.1, along with quite an extensive list of fixes and features which you can check out in the changelog.

I am no longer running VS 2013, but did confirm I had no issues with VS 2015 SSDT projects.

If you haven’t upgraded SSMS lately this is a good time, and it is free.

You can download the latest version here.