Visual Studio 2005

Visual Studio 2005 in Designer view Visual Studio 2005 in Class Designer viewVisual Studio 2005, codenamed Whidbey (a reference to Whidbey Island in Puget Sound), was released online in October 2005 and hit the stores a couple of weeks later. Microsoft removed the ".NET" moniker from Visual Studio 2005 (as well as every other product with .NET in its name), but it still primarily targets the .NET Framework, which was upgraded to version 2.0. Visual Studio 2005's internal version number is 8.0 while the file format version is 9.0.[4] Microsoft released service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 on 14 December 2006.
Visual Studio 2005 was upgraded to support all the new features introduced in .NET Framework 2.0, including generics and ASP.NET 2.0. The IntelliSense feature in Visual Studio was upgraded for generics and new project types were added to support ASP.NET web services. Visual Studio 2005 also includes a local web server, separate from IIS, that can be used to host ASP.NET applications during development and testing. It also supports all SQL Server 2005 databases. Database designers were upgraded to support the ADO.NET 2.0, which is included with .NET Framework 2.0. C++ also got a similar upgrade with the addition of C++/CLI which is slated to replace the use of Managed C++.
Other new features of Visual Studio 2005 include the "Deployment Designer" which allows application designs to be validated before deployments, an improved environment for web publishing when combined with ASP.NET 2.0 and load testing to see application performance under various sorts of user loads.
Visual Studio 2005 also added extensive 64-bit support. While the development environment itself is only available as a 32-bit application, Visual C++ 2005 supports compiling for x86-64 (AMD64 and Intel 64) as well as IA-64 (Itanium).The Platform SDK included 64-bit compilers and 64-bit versions of the libraries.
Visual Studio 2005 is available in several editions, which are significantly different from previous versions: Express, Standard, Professional, Tools for Office, and a set of five Visual Studio Team System Editions. The latter are provided in conjunction with MSDN Premium subscriptions, covering four major roles of software development: Architects, Software Developers, Testers, and Database Professionals. The combined functionality of the four Team System Editions is provided in a Team Suite Edition.
Express Editions were introduced for amateurs, hobbyists, and small businesses, and are available as a free download from Microsoft's web site. There are Express Editions for each language (Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual J#), each targeting the .NET Framework on Windows, as well as a Visual Web Developer for creating ASP.NET web sites. The Express Editions lack many of the more advanced development tools and extensibility of the other editions such as Just-in-time JScript debugging.
After Visual Studio 2005 was released, Microsoft also released a number of products under the Visual Studio brand. For team oriented development, Microsoft introduced the Visual Studio Team System, which included the Visual Studio 2005 IDE along with a set of server applications, including a source control application called Team Foundation Server. For integration with Microsoft Office, Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) was added. It included a set of APIs to access certain functionality provided by Microsoft Office, as well as using for data from Office documents, from other applications programmatically. It also includes a set of UI controls used in Microsoft Office applications. Visual Basic for Applications was also brought under the Visual Studio umbrella and rechristened Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA). VSTA consists of a customized IDE, based on the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, and a runtime that can be embedded in applications to expose its features via the .NET object model.