Visual Studio Extensions for Sharepoint Services were announced at DevCon 2006 back in March. A demo was done at the time based on Alpha code. It was supposed to :

• Set of Project Item Templates (e.g. Web Part, Site Def, List Definition, Feature Definiton, Event Handler, Workflow Activity)
• Adds a "Sharepoint" Project Type to VS 2005
• Add required xml schemas.
• Export a site to a site defintion (Now this would be really cool!)

 
Does anyone know when we are likely to see a Beta release?