Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0

The .NET Framework 2.0 is Microsoft's managed code programming model and runtime for building applications on the Windows platform. Visual Studio is the professional development environment for building these applications. Together, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework 2.0 are designed to improve developer productivity and increase application reliability and security by providing a fully managed application environment. Developers can build high-performance, multi-tier applications for Windows and the Web, and use the .NET Compact Framework to build smart device software for mobile devices.
The .NET Framework provides Web services support that enables the more than 3.5 million .NET developers to develop, discover, debug, deploy, and consume Web services using any of the more than 20 programming languages supported on .NET. Furthermore, the .NET Framework supports WS-I Basic Profile for cross-platform interoperability. This allows .NET applications to consume and expose Web services that interoperate with virtually any application, regardless of programming language or platform.
Visual Studio's "Add Web Reference" dialog box automatically generates proxy code for WSDL-defined Web services, enabling consumption of Web services in Windows, Web, Mobile and Office-based applications.

Visual Studio also makes it easy for developers to publish and locate Web services in UDDI. From the start page of Visual Studio, developers can publish information about their Web Services directly to UDDI. As developers create new services, they can make them known across the enterprise directly from Visual Studio. By connecting to UDDI through the "Add Web Reference" dialog box, a developer may locate available Web Services.

Visual Studio also supports unit testing and load testing of Web services. Web services operations can be called directly from unit tests, much like local code. In addition, Visual Studio provides attributes and methods specifically for testing Web services.
Lastly, Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) brings the power of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework 2.0 to business solutions built on Word and Excel. All Web services functionality offered by the .NET Framework can be exposed through Word and Excel solutions. As a result, developers can expose, consume, manage, and debug Web services within these solutions.

Visual Studio Team System
Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) expands the Visual Studio product line to include new software lifecycle tools for operations managers, architects, testers, project managers, and developers. Released in November 2005, VSTS reduces the complexity of delivering distributed applications and facilitates communication among members of a software team.
For developers building Web services-enabled software, VSTS extends the core capabilities of Visual Studio 2005, enabling architects to work in teams to visually design collections of Web services and validate a distributed application's architectural design against the requirements of the deployment environment. Developers can define and modify Web methods for ASMX Web services graphically, alleviating the need to manually edit configuration files to specify Web services configuration information. VSTS also gives IT Professionals the tools to graphically specify Web services settings and constraints, such as authentication and security requirements.
VSTS includes Visual Studio Team Test (TT), an integrated Visual Studio component that enables code generation of test method stubs, code coverage analysis and running of tests inside the IDE. This functionality is useful for Web services developers that want to perform regression tests and performance tests. Since Web services generally expose a Web page for manual invocation, one can also use the integrated Web testing recorder to quickly record a series of Web services tests. Once activities against the target Web site are recorded, test code is generated and can be extended with further customization.
Lastly, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (a part of VSTS) is the team collaboration server providing functionality such as version control, work item tracking, and enterprise project management for VSTS clients. Partners can extend Team Foundation Server through a set of Web services.