updated| Microsoft on Friday will release Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta. A Microsoft representative said the service packs should be accessible from this link by 9 am Pacific time on Friday, December 15. Visual Studio Service Pack 1 (SP1) features bug fixes as well as improvements in a number of areas. A company official emphasized community part updated| Microsoft on Friday will release Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta.A Microsoft representative said the service packs should be accessible from this link by 9 am Pacific time on Friday, December 15.Visual Studio Service Pack 1 (SP1) features bug fixes as well as improvements in a number of areas. A company official emphasized community participation in the Visual Studio service pack. “For some of the product areas within Visual Studio, more than 50 percent of the bugs that we fixed were reported by customers,” said Jay Roxe, Microsoft group product manager for Visual Studio. Bug fixes cover a variety of issues, including an issue with syntax coloring for key words in programs. Some bugs pertained to crashing issues. Feature improvements include code generation and profling support for the Intel Core Duo processor. Scaling and performance are boosted for the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server collaboration server as well. Team Foundation Server also now can be integrated with Microsoft’s Excel 2007 and Project 2007 products. The service pack adds support for the Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition database and Windows Embedded 6.0. Microsoft’s ClickOnce deployment technology, for updating to the most recent versions of applications, has been extended to Visual Studio 2005 applications running on devices.SP1 features more than 70 improvements for common development scenarios, Microsoft said. The Vista service pack beta for Visual Studio 2005, meanwhile, is intended to provide the same full-fledged develpoper experience on Vista as developers have with Windows XP. There have been issues in areas such as debugging that Microsoft has been addressing. The general release of this service pack is planned for the first quarter of next year, after consumer availability of Windows Vista. Technology Industry