Continuing to fill out its Visual Studio tools line,
Microsoft has unveiled Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, aimed
at developers working in small organisations.
The company is also updating beta versions of the full Visual
Studio product family and rolling out Visual Studio .net 2003
Special Edition, a suite of products featuring a development tool
and developer versions of the Windows operating system and SQL
Server database.
Debuting at the VSLive! conference in Orlando, Standard Edition
is designed for building line-of-business applications for Windows,
the web, or mobile deployments. It works with multiple programming
languages such as Visual Basic and Visual C#.
“With the Standard product, we’re looking to move the Visual
Basic 6.0 developer forward and also looking at web developers who
might be using, say, [Macromedia’s] Dreamweaver [for web
development], said Jay Roxe, Microsoft product marketing manager
for Visual Studio.
In relation to the Visual Studio product line, the Standard
edition fits in between Visual Studio Express products, which have
been released in language-specific variants such as versions for
C++ and Visual Basic, and the more feature-rich Professional
edition.
With its Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition and other releases,
Microsoft seeks to have offerings for various market categories,
said analyst Thomas Murphy, vice-president at the Meta Group.
“Microsoft [is] trying to kind of build a smooth set of versions
to address different segments of the market,” Murphy said.
The Visual Studio 2005 products are set for general availability
in the first half of next year.
Microsoft will also release refreshed betas for its Visual
Studio 2005 products, including the Standard Edition, Professional
Edition, Express editions, and the upper end, team-oriented Visual
Studio Team System.
Developers working with the new Visual Studio 2005 Team System
beta release will be able to use the Team Foundation component,
which offers source code control, item tracking, project
management, and integration with Microsoft Project and Word. The
Team System product focuses on application lifecycle
management.
The Visual Studio .net 2003 Special Edition features a suite of
products including Visual Studio .net 2003, Windows Server 2003
Developer Edition, and the SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition
database. This suite enables developers to build and test
data-driven ASP .net web applications and Visual Basic
applications, according to Microsoft.
Shipping now, the suite is intended for building web and client
applications and takes advantage of the Office application suite,
Roxe said. The $749 (£416) price tag makes it $300 less than the
Visual Studio 2003 Professional Edition, he added.
Paul Krill writes for Infoworld