At long last Microsoft ships database, development tools

Microsoft last week released two of the cornerstones for what it says will be its business application platform for the future.

In what was billed as its "most important release of the year," Microsoft after a two-year delay shipped Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. The company also released a preview of BizTalk Server 2006, its business process-management software and the third leg of the application platform, with a beta due by year-end and final shipment in the first half of 2006. The launch was announced months in advance.

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Microsoft last week released two of the cornerstones for what it says will be its business application platform for the future.

In what was billed as its "most important release of the year," Microsoft after a two-year delay shipped Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. The company also released a preview of BizTalk Server 2006, its business process-management software and the third leg of the application platform, with a beta due by year-end and final shipment in the first half of 2006. The launch was announced months in advance.

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Microsoft says it hopes the close integration of the three products, and other software in its platform lineup, will raise its reputation in the corporate data center and become the platform for critical corporate programs such as trading floor applications.

"I have Web developers that know the Visual Studio [integrated development environment], so if you create it so the BizTalk development environment is also in the same [integrated development environment], even though there is some new features and functionality, it is a small stretch for my development team to do it," says Nick Wingeron, vice president for Citigroup's Corporate Investment Bank Technology in New York.

Wingeron is building an identity and routing hub for digital certificates using BizTalk and SQL that will be deployed early next year.

Microsoft hopes to extend the integration of Visual Studio across its platform products such as SharePoint, Windows clients, Office and packaged business applications, and wrap it all with XML, Web services and .Net.

"What you are going to see out of Microsoft going forward is a much higher level of integration between their tool packages and their back-end applications," says Rob Enderle, president of the Enderle Group. The integration is evidenced in Visual Studio 2005, which is the first set of tools that lets developers build applications that tie into Microsoft's emerging management platform called the Distributed Systems Initiative.

Microsoft says the integration of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 would show users they can build applications with better scale and performance.

Visual Studio includes support for .Net Framework 2.0 and the Visual Studio Team System, which supports collaboration among development teams. SQL Server features integrated data management and analysis tools. Last week, Microsoft also released 16 integration adapters for BizTalk 2006 that provide interoperability with business applications from Oracle and Siebel.

Microsoft also announced free versions of Express Editions of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Server 2005.

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