Microsoft launches the Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 big guns

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 8 Nov 2005 at 12:18

Microsoft has finally unveiled SQL Server 2005, the new version of its enterprise-scale database system, and Visual Studio 2005, its flagship software development suite.

The long-awaited releases signal a new Microsoft assault on the enterprise market, with the company battling on price, and hoping its built-in analysis and reporting tools represent an attractive, and more affordable, alternative to specialised business intelligence applications.

'Through deep collaboration with our customers and partners, today we're delivering powerful new platform capabilities with unprecedented integration between the server infrastructure and development tools,' said Ballmer of the software launch. 'We're enabling people to gain more insight into their businesses and play an even bigger role in the success of their organizations.'

Balmer, speaking at the main launch event in San Francisco, also referred to the well-documented delay in the release of the next-gen suites (the most recent version of SQL Server 2000 appeared in 2001 and Visual Studio.Net in 2002): 'It has been a little bit long in the making for some of these products, and maybe a little bit less bake time - well, at least a little more rapid cycle time - would be appropriate in the future, but we had a little bit of work to do, we learned a lot over the last few years about security, and I'll be darned if we weren't going to apply that learning wholeheartedly in these major releases.'

As well as more integrated development and debugging, the scalability and security features of SQL Server 2005 have been improved (as well as increased up-time during maintenance the number of concurrent users has been scaled to 93,000 up from 26,000 on the previous release).

For Visual Studio 2005, productivity features include the drop down list-style Code Snippets (templates for encouraging code-reuse) and the incorporation of 'lifecycle tools' to better place the production of lines of code in the context of overall project requirements and testing processes (an integration achieved by Borland long ago). The release also marks the arrival of version 2.0 of Microsoft's .NET Framework for Web services.

More detailed information on the product feature sets can be found at www.microsoft.com/sqlserver, msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ and www.microsoft.com/biztalk respectively.

Note that the server elements of the Visual Studio Team System will be released in Q1 2006. The client tools enable stand-alone code analysis and verification.

The main thrust of the new releases is that the software should enable greater use of existing data sources. Emphasising that new technology alone is no longer a selling point in the enterprise space - the CEO of the National Computing Centre quoted its recent survey that only '20 per cent of CIOs think that Information Technology is providing their organisation with a competitive advantage' - Microsoft is proclaiming the adaptability of its software to business requirements and practices.

One example from a beta tester of SQL Server, Tesco.com (which went live on the SQL Server beta), involved processing of Club Card data. As online grocery shoppers are potentially faced with a daunting list of 20,000 Tesco products, the company lets shoppers enter their club card number in order for the past shopping choices from a specific number of months to appear as favourites within their browser, within 60 seconds.