Microsoft made three important announcements this week for us .NET Developers.

Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition becomes part of other VSTS SKUS
As of Wednesday, October 1st, the "Data Dude" edition of of Visual Studio will be merged into Visual Studio Team System Development Edition. So if you are an MSDN Subscriber and subscribe to VSTS Development, you will be able to download the Database Edition. If you subscribe to the database SKU, you can download the Development edition. This makes perfect sense. I, for one, do all of my own database management and I'm sure benefit a huge percentage of developers.

Silverlight 2 "Release Candidate" was made available earlier this week for developers. That's the last stage before final release which generally happens soon after the RC.

This release gives developers an opportunity to prepare their apps for the final release of the runtime. Updated tools for Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend were also released.

All of the goodies are at http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/sl2rc0.aspx.

According to Scott Guthrie, this new iteration "includes a ton of bug fixes and some significant performance optimization work".

The existing controls have seen improvements and there are also some new controls in there - a ComboBox, a ProgressBar and a PasswordBox.

What's very nice to see is improvements that target more low level development needs such as data caching and networking.

Check out Scott's post (linked above) for his usual detailed look at what's new.

Visual Studio 2010 announced
The other big "on the horizon" news is that Microsoft has gone public with what they are working on for the next version of Visual Studio. There is a lot of focus on support for team development and agile processes.

You can find lots of info in Somasegar's blog post (Soma is Sr VP of Microsoft's Developer Division), What's next for Visual Studio and .NET FX?

This article by Esther Schindler even has a few quotes from yours truly.
Microsoft Announces Visual Studio 2010. Developers Respond.