"We've been waiting a long time for the damn thing," said Tim Huckaby, CEO of InterKnowlogy, a Microsoft Gold-level partner that does custom application development. But he said the product was postponed because Microsoft did not want to ship it before it was ready to go.

InterKnowlogy has one customer going live with a Visual Studio 2005 application for insurance underwriting. Another client, a golf equipment manufacturer, has a Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System application from the 2005 toolset that compares metrics of golf clubs, Huckaby said.

"We got the [two] projects done in a faction of [the] time" that would have been required in the current Visual Studio product, Huckaby said. The tool set enables more productivity, which means projects get done quicker and cost clients a lot less, he said.

"The gist of the [new product set] is developer productivity" via an enhanced .Net Framework that features new framework classes, Huckaby said. These classes mean developers do not have to write this code themselves, he said. The Visual Studio IDE also offers enhanced debugging, Huckaby said.

Homnick said one of his clients, a city government, will use a Visual Studio 2005 application that leverages SQL Server reporting services to generate government reports.