Arvind Shyamsundar explains a recent Management Studio change:
One such change SSMS got for free is the connection resiliency logic within the SqlConnection.Open() method. To improve the default experience for clients which connect to Azure SQL Database, the above method will (in the case of initial connection errors / timeouts) now retry 1 time after sleeping for 10 seconds. These numbers are configurable by properties called ConnectRetryCount (default value 1) and ConnectRetryInterval (default value 10 seconds.) The previous versions of the SqlConnection class would not automatically retry in cases of connection failure.
In general, because of these changes, transient errors (across slow networks or when working with Azure SQL Database) are less frequent. However, when you consider that a lot of SSMS users still use it with ‘regular’ SQL Server – either in a VM in the cloud or on-premises, there is a subtle but distinct impact of these changes which may affect administrators of ‘regular’ SQL Server databases.
Read on for details on why Management Studio hangs for 10-second periods, and see how to disable connection retry yourself.