Soma announces Visual Studio 2005 RC1 and Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server (TFS) Beta 3 will be released in September. The Beta 3 will feature a Go Live license, so organizations can immediately begin using the Team System features. Release of TFS is slated for the first quarter of 2006, and all data in the Beta 3 edition will (in theory) migrate seamlessly to the final version of TFS.

Additionally, a new synch’d build of SQL Server 2005 will be released, as follows:

§In conjunction with the Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate, the SQL Server team will release the final CTP for SQL Server 2005 in September. The final CTP is compatible with the Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate, feature complete and is the most stable release of SQL Server 2005 to date.

§The final CTP is the last opportunity customers have to provide feedback on SQL Server 2005 before it ships on November 7th. Microsoft is dedicated to building a quality product and encourages customers interested in deploying SQL Server 2005 to test this build.

§Our customers have praised the CTP process and their ability to provide ongoing feedback to the development team. For this reason, we decided to ship CTP for the remainder of the development cycle.

Personally, I’m glad to see a solid build of VS coming out before RTM, since I have a lot of demos I need to have working for presentations in the next few months, and I’d really rather be doing them on a build closer to RTM than Beta 2. I’m also very much looking forward to using VSTS and TFS for my own dev projects, but am not quite brave enough to use the Tech Ed bits for that (and I haven’t had time to play with the June or later CTPs).

A lot of people have been asking Microsoft to release a third beta before going to release with VS and ASP.NET, so I think this will please a lot of people.