For years I have been an advocate of making any and all hotfix information available to the public.  I used to stumble upon new builds in the KB by accident, and so I took it upon myself to collect and publish lists of new hotfixes (e.g. here and here) as I found them and as time allowed.

Well, Microsoft is making it easier for us to stay on top of this ourselves, without making us search constantly, and without intruding on our daily lives (e.g. shoving every single hotfix, even those available only through a support incident, down our throats via Windows Update).

They have added this KB article, which highlights /most/ of the fixes and patches that have come out since SP2:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937137

(I say /most/ because at least one is missing: 3171 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937745)

It is my hope that they will keep this article up to date and/or add new, similar articles as necessary (e.g. a separate post-SP3 article).

Also, I am sure this is pretty common knowledge by now, but there are RSS feeds for KB article additions / modifications / deletions by product.  I'm kind of annoyed that there isn't a generic SQL Server 2005 category, but rather I must pick Standard, or Developer, or Enterprise, etc.  Anyway for us SQL Server MVPs you can configure your own subscriptions under the "Notification Manager" node in the private MVP web site.  The feeds themselves seem to be public but since they have an mvp.support.microsoft.com URL I'm not sure I am allowed to disclose the location.  I will post back with more info if/when I get it.

There is a public version here:

http://support.microsoft.com/common/rss.aspx?rssid=2855

However it contains less than half of the articles that are listed on the feed I use internally. 

To restrict to the list of fixes (eliminating webcasts, unsolved bugs, information and how-to's), I change the "Displaying" text box to contain "FIX:" or "cumulative"…