I have been reading some pretty interesting information released yesterday as the result of announcements from Tech Ed Europe - that is the new
Express releases (betas) of several Visual Studio tools, in particular, a couple of unexpected tools, Visual Web Dev 2005 Express and SQL Server 2005 Express. I would guess that the Visual Web Dev product stems from the Web Matrix tool that has been around for a while and the SQL Server Express tool is a newer release of MSDE. As I have been using the full product of Visual Studio 2005 since the PDC last fall (and a couple of updates since), it is reassuring that now that we have entered the official beta stage, the final release can't be that far off.