Visual Studio Renews Pitch for Developers

Visual Studio 2005 (VS 2005) promises improvements for the core development cycle-editing, compiling, and debugging code-across all of Microsoft’s programming languages. As the next major update of Microsoft’s integrated development environment (IDE), its improvements address limitations in the previous two versions that either hindered developers from making the jump to .NET or reduced the productivity of those who did. While Visual Studio is expanding beyond core development, the success of Microsoft’s .NET technology depends on the IDE’s appeal to its current developer base.

New VS 2005 features that go beyond core development include the following:

• A source code control system based on SQL Server
• Application modeling tools that tie into Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative for managing applications and systems
• Tools designed to help project managers better track and communicate the state of a software development project.

All of these features will be covered in future articles in Update.