The new edition includes tools Microsoft says will help bring database professionals into the application lifecycle, and make it easier to produce managed code out of database applications.

The new part of Visual Studio will be available later this year, but will be on display at the company's TechEd 2006 conference in Boston later in June. The company describes the launch as the next milestone on the path to the next version of Visual Studio, which is slated to launch sometime after Windows Vista.