Prepare to be overwhelmed by this week's long-awaited launch of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005, whose final bits were frozen late last month -- perhaps before they should have been. Every tool maker that I regularly cover has been in touch with me over the last few weeks -- in some cases, during the last few hours -- to make sure that its new and updated products get their share of the reflected limelight of this well-hyped event.

With any release of a major Microsoft tool set, two questions are always worth asking: What's in it for Microsoft, and what's in it for everyone else?

As eWEEK's Peter Galli observes in this week's eWEEK Podcast, "Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft" without some strategy for using a new technology to strengthen users' ties to Microsoft's platform: In the case of Visual Studio 2005, it's clear that a prime beneficiary will be the concurrent new release of SQL Server, combining substantial new features with superior integration into the business logic development cycle.

Many crumbs will also fall from Microsoft's table to enrich independent technology providers such as Identify Software Ltd., whose AppSight Black Box technology will be integrated into Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System to let developers exchange fully instrumented snapshots of any problem situations and behaviors that they encounter. "The tester doesn't have to document the steps that were executed, the behavior that was observed: That takes 20 to 30 percent of the tester's time," estimated Identify VP Lori Wizdo when we spoke last month about the company's plans in concert with the VS '05 launch. "We can cut problem resolution time by 10 to 15 percent for even the simplest problems, 70 to 90 percent for the more complex ones."

Also attendant on the Visual Studio 2005 launch will be Fortify Software Inc., whose Security Tester will integrate "white box" testing facilities under the Visual Studio environment.

It would be a mistake, though, to infer that Visual Studio 2005 is the new center of the development universe merely because it shines so brightly. The center of our real-world galaxy, after all, appears to be a black hole whose presence has to be inferred from its effects on its surroundings rather than directly observed. One could say the same about continuing developments in the Java development community, with this week's JavaOne Tokyo event sure to see some important announcements surrounding Sun's Java Studio Enterprise 8: the all-singing, all-dancing, even more fully UML-integrated successor to the Version 7 product that won this year's eWEEK Excellence award for development environments.

Also taking place this week is Borland's Developer Conference, starting the day after Microsoft's launch event – good timing, that -- in the same city of San Francisco. I've commented in the past that Borland aspires to be the Switzerland of development tools, and I still think that's the company's goal in a world that will remain multiplatform as far into the future as it makes any sense to plan.

The real center of tomorrow's developer universe is the availability of pervasive, high-speed connections to repurposeable data and to dynamically accessible processing power. Visual Studio 2005 will be an important vehicle for getting there, but it won't be the only one -- and the journey is not the destination, no matter how much any of the industry's enthusiastic cruise directors might try to convince you otherwise.

Tell me what observations you use to determine the true future center of things at peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.

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This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.