Application Platform

Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 shipped in Nov. 2007. The new release of the .NET Framework adds new programming language features that will make it easier to write applications that access data from sources such as SQL Server.

Silverlight 1.1, which adds support for the .NET Framework, was rechristened Silverlight 2.0 and a beta release was also made available to developers.

SQL Server

The SQL Server product consists of a database management system (DBMS) and a platform for business intelligence. The BI platform includes components for extracting data from operational systems for analysis (Integration Services), online analytic processing and data mining (Analysis Services), and design and distribution of reports (Reporting Services).

SQL Server 2005 delivers improvements to DBMS functions including support for both x64 and Itanium processors, support for online index operations and online database restore to reduce the impact of these maintenance operations on users, native support for encryption of client/server communications to prevent eavesdropping and spoofing of database traffic. A new integrated management suite, the SQL Server Management Studio, consolidates the various tools used to manage previous versions of the product, and integration of the .NET Framework into the database engine enables development of stored procedures and triggers in conventional languages such as C#, simplifying programming for more complex procedures.