By Greg DeMichillie [bio]
Posted: Oct. 31, 2005

Visual Studio (VS) 2005 is the most significant VS release since the introduction of Visual Studio .NET in 2002. VS is Microsoft's flagship developer product and provides tools to design, develop, and debug applications for both desktop and server versions of Windows, as well as for devices running Microsoft's Windows Mobile software.

VS 2005 addresses longstanding weaknesses that have caused some customers to delay moving to .NET and also brings a raft of new features designed to help teams of developers, testers, and project managers work together. Partners benefit from new team features that provide a better development platform, although other partners will find that Microsoft is now also a competitor. VS 2005's integration with SQL Server 2005, a critical product for Microsoft's Server and Tools division, as well as the possibility of increased tools revenue from the higher-priced team editions offer clear benefits for Microsoft.

Specifically, VS 2005 brings improvements in four major areas: developer productivity, Web development, database programming, and software project management.

Developer productivity. Although each release of VS typically offers new integrated development environment (IDE) capabilities, VS 2005 is particularly important to the many Visual Basic (VB) developers who have thus far resisted moving to the .NET Framework because previous versions of VS lacked some key IDE features relied on by many VB developers. VS 2005 will entice VB holdouts by reintroducing some of those key features.

Web development. VS 2005 is a better Web application development tool because it builds on ASP.NET 2.0, the latest version of Microsoft's Web development platform that allows Web developers to create more sophisticated Web applications with less code. In addition, ASP.NET 2.0 is the foundation for many upcoming Microsoft server products, including the next version of Windows SharePoint Services, so by making ASP.NET development easier, Microsoft is also making it easier for developers to build on and customize other Microsoft products as well.

Database programming. VS 2005 is integrated with SQL Server 2005 (being launched at the same time) and allows developers to use the .NET Framework to build application code, such as stored procedures, that run inside the database, potentially improving the performance of computationally intensive database operations.

Software project management. With the introduction of the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), Microsoft is significantly expanding the scope of VS to include not only the core edit-compile-debug tasks but also advanced features such as application modeling, project management, bug tracking, and team development. Teams of developers will work together more productively and project managers will better understand the status of their development projects. Although the client portions of VSTS will ship with the rest of VS 2005, the server components aren't expected until the first quarter of 2006.

This report discusses each of these themes in depth and explains their impact on Microsoft's customers and partners.

What's Ahead

Each of these areas is discussed in subsequent chapters of this report:

"VS 2005 Renews Pitch for Developers" discusses improvements to the VS 2005 IDE and each of Microsoft's main programming languages: VB, C#, and C++.

"ASP.NET 2.0 Simplifies Web Development" explores the latest version of ASP.NET and how VS 2005 offers a better IDE for Web development than previous versions.

"Data Access Improvements Aimed at SQL" explains how VS 2005 takes advantage of the integration of the .NET Framework with SQL Server 2005, and how changes in ADO.NET—Microsoft's primary data-access API—help developers and partners create applications that work across a variety of database back-ends.

"Team System Targets Multiple Roles" provides an overview of VSTS and the various roles in the development life cycle that it is designed to assist.

"VSTS Checks in New Source Control" explains the new source-code control system that is at the heart of VSTS and that is designed to help teams of developers better coordinate their work.

"Project Management Comes to Visual Studio" shows how VSTS helps project managers by providing metrics that track the status of a project. This chapter also discusses the two predefined development methodologies that teams can choose to adopt, and how third parties (such as Unisys) are extending VSTS to support their own methodologies.

"Visual Studio, Modeling, and DSI" evaluates how the new application modeling features of VSTS could help organizations build better software and how they relate to Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI)—a companywide goal to use modeling to make software less expensive to build, deploy, and manage on an ongoing basis.

"Major Changes in Licensing" explains changes in the way Microsoft prices and licenses its developer tools.