SQL Server 2005 Top 10 Features for Development

Feature	Description
Hosted CommonLanguage Runtime	With SQL Server 2005 developers can create database objects using familiar languages such as Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Basic .NET. Developers can also create two new objects—user-defined types and aggregates.
Native XML Support	Native XML data can be stored, queried, and indexed in a SQL Server database—allowing developers to build new classes of connected applications around Web services and across any platform or device.
ADO.NET version 2.0	From new support for SQL Types to Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS), ADO.NET in SQL Server 2005 evolves dataset access and manipulation to achieve greater scalability and flexibility.
Security Enhancements	The security model in SQL Server 2005 separate users from objects, provides fine-grain access, and enables greater control of data access. Additionally, all system tables are implemented as views, providing more control over database system objects.
Transact-SQL Enhancements	SQL Server 2005 provides new language capabilities for developing scalable database applications. These enhancements include error handling, recursive query capabilities, relational operator PIVOT, APPLY, ROW_NUMBER and other row ranking functions, and more.
Reliable Messaging for Asynchronous Applications	Service Broker is a robust messaging infrastructure that provides reliable transactional delivery of critical messages between servers—with the scalable high-performance that is expected with asynchronous queuing.
Visual Studio Integration	Tight integration with Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET Framework streamlines development and debugging of data-driven applications. Developers can build database objects, such as stored procedures, using any .NET language and can seamlessly debug across .NET and Transact-SQL (TSQL) languages.
Web Services	With SQL Server 2005 developers can develop Web services in the database tier, making SQL Server a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) listener and providing a new type of data access capability for Web services-centric applications.
Embedded Reports	Use client-side reporting controls to embed real-time reports into an application at design time.
Full-Text Search Enhancements	SQL Server 2005 supports rich, full-text search applications. Cataloging capabilities provide greater flexibility over what is cataloged. Query performance and scalability have been improved dramatically, and new management tools provide greater insight into the full-text implementation.