Microsoft Launches Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005

Microsoft launches the first of many products that have been pent up for long in their impressive pipeline. Over the next couple of years, we will see the XBox 360, Windows Vista, Office 12 and tons of allied products within the Windows ecosystem. Most will be built using one of the two products launched today - Visual Studio 2005. The powerful database engine, SQL Server 2005 delivers impressive power and features, although it may take a miracle to dislodge the current enterprise database systems, Oracle and IBM DB2.

For the technologist, especially a Windows maven, these are long-awaited updates. Visual Studio is one of the best Integrated Development Environments around. It provides a set of software tools to build Windows and Office Applications in a number of languages. The new version provides the second version of the .NET framework, Microsoft's answer to the Java Enterprise system. One key enhancement in the two products integrates Visual Studio with SQL Server, allowing for managed custom objects to be created on the database. This enables true object-oriented database development. Most other features enable enhanced developer productivity. The Intellisense feature provides suggestions to code as you type, which can be downright scary in it's intuitiveness.

The Visual Studio Team System provides comprehensive Application Lifecycle Management to Windows developers within the Visual Studio framework. This enables collaborative development of applications, allowing application models to flow into development artifacts, and test suites.

Web development is elevated to a higher level with the new version of ASP.NET, while new versions of Microsoft .NET languages like Visual Basic and Visual C# promise to make the development cycle more productive for toiling millions of coders the world over. The poor sots currently, and in the past, have had to plow through numerous repetitive and potentially bug-ridden code routines to deliver software. Their hour of deliverance is not quite at hand, but draws near. Rumor has it the shrink-wrapped box of Visual Studio has the words 'Don't Panic' emblazones across it in holographic fonts. Rumor also has it that early users of the Visual Studio 2005 IDE are complaining it's buggy and needed more testing - not really a new thing with complex software products, Microsoft or otherwise.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is a polished beast. It provides a host of database-level enhancements, most significantly a native XML datatype, and full-text search capabilities. The tight integration with Visual Studio allows significantly higher-level programming of stored procedures and other data layer tasks.

Free full-version copies of the products will be available at the launch events, which kick off in San Francisco's Moscone Center on November 7th, the site of Oracle OpenWorld a short while ago. Free developer versions of the products under the Express moniker will provide legitimate access to anyone to develop the next Firefox/Oracle/Office-killer.

Coming soon: Detailed review of .NET 2.0 components, Avalon and Indigo - if those mean anything to you, you'll look forward to them, if not, they promise to make your computing experiences better and seamless, lulling you into a calm before the event horizon of the Singularity

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