Yesterday afternoon Microsoft released Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 for download at MSDN. This is not yet another release. It's a big one. It will (hopefully) change how we develop applications. SQL Server is an important part of it of course with it's new possibilities for handling XML, hosting CLR and exposing Web Services (and more). .NET Framework has a lot of new goodies, which it has been written a lot about. What get most attention is the "big" things like the new Membership functionality in ASP.NET 2, all new controls for both winform and webform, but there are also plenty of smaller things like string.IsNullOrEmpty (missed that a lot before). It will take time for all of us who have been working in .NET for a while to get used to it and to not keep on doing it our "old" way. Our tool (Visual Studio) has also become a lot better in many areas and they have fixed many things that we use third parties for today. We will be more productive out of the box. For those of us who start using Team System, we will probably also change the way we do things in the overall project view to. Enjoy upgrading!