In other developments being announced on Monday:

* Microsoft is releasing to manufacturing Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office for the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Developers can build applications around the six major Office applications: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio and InfoPath. Microsoft on Monday that it has released Office 2007 to manufacturing, with downloads available on December 1.

* The company issued a release candidate for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition, an embeddable database with a 2-MB footprint. The release candidate is available