page_title: Microsoft Visual Studio
section_title: 2005
hierarchical_section_title: Microsoft Visual Studio / History / 2005
caption_attribution_description: English: Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 Team Suite DVD
context_page_description: Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Store and Microsoft Silverlight. It can produce both native code and managed code.
  Visual Studio includes a code editor supporting IntelliSense as well as code refactoring. The integrated debugger works both as a source-level debugger and a machine-level debugger. Other built-in tools include a code profiler, designer for building GUI applications, web designer, class designer, and database schema designer. It accepts plug-ins that expand the functionality at almost every level—including adding support for source control systems and adding new toolsets like editors and visual designers for domain-specific languages or toolsets for other aspects of the software development lifecycle.
  Visual Studio supports 36 different programming languages and allows the code editor and debugger to support nearly any programming language, provided a language-specific service exists.
context_section_description: Visual Studio 2005, codenamed Whidbey (a reference to Whidbey Island in Puget Sound region), was released online in October 2005 and to retail stores a few weeks later. Microsoft removed the ".NET" moniker from Visual Studio 2005 (as well as every other product with .NET in its name), but it still primarily targets the .NET Framework, which was upgraded to version 2.0. It is the last version available for Windows 2000 and also the last version to be able to target Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows NT 4.0 for C++ applications.
  Visual Studio 2005's internal version number is 8.0 while the file format version is 9.0. Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 on 14 December 2006. An additional update for Service Pack 1 that offers Windows Vista compatibility was made available on 3 June 2007.
  Visual Studio 2005 was upgraded to support all the new features introduced in .NET Framework 2.0, including generics and ASP.NET 2.0. The IntelliSense feature in Visual Studio was upgraded for generics and new project types were added to support ASP.NET web services. Visual Studio 2005 additionally introduces support for a new task-based build platform called Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) which employs a new XML-based project file format. Visual Studio 2005 also includes a local web server, separate from IIS, that can host ASP.NET applications during development and testing. It also supports all SQL Server 2005 databases. Database designers were upgraded to support the ADO.NET 2.0, which is included with .NET Framework 2.0. C++ also got a similar upgrade with the addition of C++/CLI which is slated to replace the use of Managed C++. Other new features of Visual Studio 2005 include the "Deployment Designer" which allows application designs to be validated before deployments, an improved environment for web publishing when combined with ASP.NET 2.0 and load testing to see application performance under various sorts of user loads. Starting with the 2005 edition, Visual Studio also added extensive 64-bit support. While the host development environment itself is only available as a 32-bit application, Visual C++ 2005 supports compiling for x86-64 (AMD64 and Intel 64) as well as IA-64 (Itanium). The Platform SDK included 64-bit compilers and 64-bit versions of the libraries.
  Microsoft also announced Visual Studio Tools for Applications as the successor to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and VSA (Visual Studio for Applications). VSTA 1.0 was released to manufacturing along with Office 2007. It is included with Office 2007 and is also part of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK. VSTA consists of a customized IDE, based on the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, and a runtime that can be embedded in applications to expose its features via the .NET object model. Office 2007 applications continue to integrate with VBA, except for InfoPath 2007 which integrates with VSTA. Version 2.0 of VSTA (based on Visual Studio 2008) was released in April 2008. It is significantly different from the first version, including features such as dynamic programming and support for WPF, WCF, WF, LINQ, and .NET 3.5 Framework.
caption: Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 Team Suite installation disc
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