The next version of SQL Server is going to be released in 2005. We saw a preview of the IDE and some features that will be available.
One major point is that the IDE is integrated into one program (SQL Workbench) instead of two in SQL Server 2000 (Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager). The new IDE looks slick and updated from the visual point of view. It also looks like it will make things easier, instead of having multiple places to update things, it is all in once place.
Another new thing with SQL Server 2005 is the way it works with XML. XML is a native data type in 2005, and also there are new commands to query the XML field, which look really cool if you want to stream XML into SQL Server
The last thing that we saw was the integration of the CLR into SQL Server 2005. You can created stored procedures, functions, triggers, and user data types in Visual Studio 2005 and then integrate them into SQL Server, which is really cool! Finally all the things that were really tough in T-SQL you can now do in VB.net or C#.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 