Microsoft Corp. today announced availability of Visual Studio® 2005 Beta 2, Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 and the SQL Server (TM) 2005 April Community Technology Preview (CTP), the latest milestone in delivering these products to customers. Together, the products provide a deeply integrated development and data management platform, enabling customers to utilize existing skills and familiar tools to harness data in powerful new ways that increase productivity and efficiency. Several early adopters such as ABS-CBN Interactive, ORF and Townsend Analytics Ltd. have deployed these products in their production environments to reap the benefits of close tool and database integration. Because of broad customer demand to work with these prerelease products today, Microsoft also announced the Microsoft Go-Live license program for customers interested in deploying Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition immediately. Microsoft and multiple partners today also announced plans to provide customers with educational resources that will help them prepare for the launch of these two products.

"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. "When we set out to develop these products, we envisioned building a solution that offered unprecedented integration between development and the database to help our customers be more productive. With these releases, we have delivered on that promise and expect to drastically change the way our customers develop and utilize their applications."