Microsoft Launches Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005

Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) today announced availability of Visual Studio® 2005 Beta 2, Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 and the SQL Server (TM) 2005 April Community Technology Preview (CTP), the latest milestone in delivering these products to customers.

Together, the products provide a deeply integrated development and data management platform, enabling customers to utilize existing skills and familiar tools to harness data in powerful new ways that increase productivity and efficiency.

Because of broad customer demand to work with these prerelease products today, Microsoft also announced the Microsoft Go-Live license program for customers interested in deploying Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition immediately.

"Delivering Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the SQL Server 2005 April CTP to customers is a milestone because it indicates that we have entered the final stages of the development cycle for both products," said Eric Rudder, senior vice president of Servers and Tools at Microsoft.

In response to strong customer demand, Microsoft will again provide an addendum to the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 End User License Agreement (EULA) that will enable customers to deploy applications into production based on the Beta 2 release.

"Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 have provided us with a rich and full-featured development framework, which has improved developer productivity and assists us in meeting very short project timelines," said William Freker, lead solutions architect at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

The ability to deploy applications with beta code will enable customers to get their products to market even more quickly after the official launch of Visual Studio 2005.

"Wine.com and Magenic Technologies have been able to quickly deliver a service-oriented architecture with increased business functionality," said Kevin Kriner, practice lead for Application Development at Magenic Technologies Inc.

"Moving to an all-CTP model for SQL Server 2005 is really a testament to where we are in the development cycle," said Paul Flessner, senior vice president of applications servers at Microsoft.

SQL Server 2005 is a data management platform that includes integrated business intelligence, development and management tools. To date, customers ABS CBNi, Barnes & Noble, MetaLife, Recall, Sandvik Coromant, Summit Partners and Townsend Analytics have deployed the CTP for SQL Server 2005 in production and are experiencing performance, manageability and productivity gains compared with SQL Server 2000.

"SQL Server 2005 gives us the ability to do more with less; we have seen a 20 percent performance increase in our beta tests," said James Holt, vice president of Server Development at Townsend Analytics.

Microsoft also continues to deploy SQL Server 2005 internally and has more than 65 applications in production today. In addition, Microsoft is running full SAP payroll, expense, tax data warehouse and document repository systems, and has more than 10 instances of SQL Server 2005 storing multiple terabytes of data.