Unless you are living under a rock you are probably aware that Microsoft released Visual Studio 2005 today in conjunction with SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006. This is a release that has been a long time coming and many of us .NET developers have been waiting for. I have been working with VS 2005 since pre-beta1 and it is huge improvement over VS 2003.
Also annouced today, Microsoft will be giving away the Express Editions of VS 2005 for the period of one year. These are the editions that will be low cost in the $80-$100 range.
It seems on the heels of this announcement that Microsoft has plans for a service pack for the VS2005 release as well as a much overdue one for VS2003. The announcement was made by a Microsoft C# product manager, so it seem official.
Yet another release today from Microsoft is the Web Services Enhancements 3.0, which is the much anticipated add-on to VS2005 to help create secure web services under .NET 2.0.
There are probably some tidbits I missed, I will update if I hear about any additional releases of interest.