Microsoft has begun public testing of its next generation development platform with the availability of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 and the SQL Server 2005 April Community Technology Preview (CTP). 'Delivering Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the SQL Server 2005 April CTP to customers is a milestone because it indicates that we have entered the final stages of the development cycle for both products, ' said Eric Rudder, senior vice president of Servers and Tools at Microsoft.

Redmond is confident in the stability of the new software and therefore it has announced a Microsoft Go-Live licensing programme for customers who want to deploy applications and services based on Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition immediately. The company says that the Go-Live licence, will permit the deployment of not only ASP.NET Web applications, but also Windows Forms, Visual Studio Tools for Office-based applications, and .NET Compact Framework applications supporting current and future Windows Mobile-based devices. As further evidence that Microsoft is prepared to bet the farm on its code, the company says it has more than 65 applications based on SQL Server 2005. The company also revealed that it has more than 10 instances of SQL Server 2005 storing multiple terabytes of data that have processed more than 7 billion transactions against Microsoft's SAP system.