Today at Microsoft Corp.'s 12th annual Tech•Ed conference, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer took the stage in front of a sold-out audience to showcase innovations that enable developers, IT professionals and information workers to get more value across all stages of the software application life cycle. Ballmer stressed how these advances in enterprise tools, paired with Microsoft's ongoing commitment to security innovations and IT productivity, will boost business agility and increase software quality across the IT life cycle.

The new tools and technologies Ballmer announced include the following:

• Visual Studio® 2005 Team System, an expansion of the Visual Studio product line to include a suite of extensible life-cycle tools that enables all members of the IT organization to collaborate on delivering service-oriented applications that are designed for operations
• The immediate availability of Web Services Enhancements 2.0, a supported add-on to Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework that enables developers to more easily build and consume security-enhanced Web services using the latest Web services protocol specifications. In addition, the technology preview of Microsoft BizTalk® Server Adapter for Web Services Enhancements 2.0 is available for orchestrating security-enhanced Web services and exposing business process flows as secure Web services.
• Technical beta release of the Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework, an integrated set of tools and components designed to enable developers to rapidly build metadata-driven smart client solutions that enable seamless interaction with data from disparate enterprise systems for users of the Microsoft Office System

Ballmer also reinforced the ongoing priority of security-related issues and improvements.