MR. GATES: Good morning. Welcome to Dev Days. It's really exciting the way the Internet is changing the way we do business and the way we work. But at the heart of this is a new generation of applications, applications that run on a server, but take advantage of the rich capabilities of all the PCs and other devices that are out there. And Microsoft's success has always been keyed off of providing developers with tools to build the best applications. And so, in this new age of Internet applications, we're taking all of our developer pieces, and advancing them to make it as easy as possible to build these applications.

These new applications require a number of elements to come together, fantastic tools, data management, middleware to reach out to other systems and manage the components, and then interoperability so that all the data from other applications can be integrated in as well.

In order to make it simple to build an application that combines these elements, we have a comprehensive approach. And we're offering products in each of these areas. The tools, of course, are Visual Studio; our data product is SQL Server; the middleware component, the object plumbing, and the capabilities there are actually built into the Windows operating system. In the area of interoperability, we have BizTalk, which is based on XML, the new Internet exchange standard which is becoming increasingly important. And then, we have our product SNA Server with a new generation code named Babylon, that is the connection up to the mainframe, to make sure that all the information you have there can be accessed as well.

So, it's really about how all of these things come together. Now, there's a major milestone just ahead of us here, and that's the release of Windows 2000 to the marketplace. This has been the largest investment Microsoft has ever made, and it's a key element to run these new applications, whether it's the ease of configuration, the scalabilities, the reliability, all of these things are advanced very substantially in Windows 2000. It's fair to say that Microsoft is betting the company on Windows 2000 in the same way we did on the original Windows, on the original Windows NT. And so, we've really been listening to what people want to see in an advanced platform, a platform that's common to the desktop and to the server, and even very, very large servers, to the data center itself, we've built the product that fits in there.

Now, what's going on around Windows 2000? It's not just our development team that's building and testing this project. And, as I said, that's our largest ever. It's also a comprehensive set of partners that are bringing this together. The system manufacturers are doing a great job testing their systems, and designing systems that are specifically optimized to work with Windows 2000. In fact, we've had great cooperation even before the Windows 2000 is released. We have early use programs, and the hardware manufacturers have been working with our mutual customers to make sure we get the feedback before the bids go final.

We're also getting great support from the software development community. There are thousands of applications that are particularly exploiting Windows 2000, and we're making sure with all the developers that their existing applications not only run, but run even better in this new environment. The final element, I think, is something we've done far better with this product than any we've ever released. And that is getting it out into customer's hands when we still have chances to refine the product to meet their requirements. So, over a half a million customers are involved in using the beta versions of the product before the release to manufacturing, and that, of course, includes all the channel partners, who are making sure that Windows 2000 gets used in all the different ways that we expect people will want to take advantage of it.

So, we're really on the verge of getting this product out into the marketplace. And I can't tell you how excited we are about that. Now, a big part of this is the comprehensive nature of the product. It will become the standard on business desktops and laptops. A lot of companies have been fragmented, some using our Windows high-end based on Windows NT, version 4 primarily, and some still using Windows 95 or Windows 98. With Windows 2000, the chance to unify that, and have something with lower support costs and better capabilities will really drive that as the standard.

And then, of course, we have the high-end version, where we've even broken out the packaging now to have the server version, the advanced server version, and then a new version, which is the highest end, which is the data center version of Windows. So, one user interface, one set of applications interfaces, but the four different versions that we've come out with are tuned to the particular kinds of systems that you'll want to run them on.

Well, let's take a quick look at Windows 2000 in action. In order to help me with that, I've asked Jeff Price, Group Products Manager, to come on up and give us a look.

MR. PRICE: Thanks, Bill.

Now, today's event is all about showing developers how they're actually going to run better and do more on Windows 2000. But I wanted to take a couple of minutes and show how end users and administrators in addition to developers will get a lot out of the product, and really like it.

Now, Windows 2000, as you said, is designed to support servers of all sizes, business desktops, and laptops. So, I want to focus on some key features in each of those areas, starting with the server. Now, one of the areas of focus we did for the server was to improve manageability. And the focal point for manageability in Windows 2000 server is Active Directory. So, on this server, I have Active Directory running, and we've modeled an organization.

Active Directory allows the administrator to have one place to store, access and manage information about network resources, such as users, printers and computers, and you can see some of those in this window here. By doing that modeling in Active Directory, the administrator can define policies which apply wherever the user logs into on the network, and control things such as the software applications the user has access to. You can see we've defined a set of applications we want our users on this network to be able to use.

We can also control via policy Windows settings such as where the user's documents are stored, whether it's on the local device or on the network, and we can define administrative templates that control which features of Windows the users have access to. And again, by applying that policy once at some point on the Active Directory hierarchy, that will be applied anywhere the user logs into.

Now, a second manageability point that people have been concerned about is being able to remotely manage systems more easily. We've done a lot in Windows 2000 to enable that. And the easiest way to see some of that is to actually pick a computer out of some place in Active Directory, right click on it, and choose manage. What this will do is launch the computer management console remotely against that computer, so the administrator can do things like view the event log, look at system information to see what devices are running on the system, manage the storage on the local device, and manage the configuration of services and applications without ever going out to the local device. So, this should really lower the cost of management.

Now, there are a lot of places that developers can integrate their applications with Active Directory, Group Policy, and the other manageability features, and they'll be learning about that later today.

Now, another important point that customers have asked for is being able to deploy the Windows 2000 experience and the applications to desktops and devices that can't run Windows 2000. So, to enable that, we've integrated the terminal services functionality into the Windows 2000 server products. What that allows you to do is remote the user interface, run your apps on the server, and remote the user interface to clients that can't run Windows 2000, which might be a Windows 3.1 machine, or a machine like the one I have here, which is a Windows CE device running a wireless network, and connecting to terminal server.

So, I'll press enter here, and we'll be able to log in just as we would to a machine running Windows 2000, get the full Windows 2000 environment, and we'll be able to run any application that can run on Windows 2000. Right now, it's going ahead and loading my personal settings so that if I log into this device when I normally use my desktop computer, I get my desktop environment. And, as you can see, I can go to the programs menu, and do something like run Microsoft Word, even though this device can't run Windows 2000 or Word.

MR. GATES: And you're using the wireless network there?

MR. PRICE: Exactly. So, I could wander around the room and get the full Windows 2000 experience, which is pretty cool.

And what's great for developers is, they can write their applications for Windows 2000 without concerning themselves with terminal services, but have their apps deployed to any type of device.

Now, being able to have Active Directory, better manageability, terminal services, are three of the great reasons that Windows 2000 will be great on the server. Let's turn now to how Windows 2000 Professional will make the desktop experience even better.

One of the things that we looked at a minute ago was how we can define Group Policy so that we can control the environment users have on their desktops. One way to see that is to go to the Add/remove programs applet in the control panel, click on the add new programs choice, and you'll see in a minute here that we have that exact set of applications that we deployed to the user from our policy in Active Directory. That means that users have access to any of these apps to install them without having to know where on the network they might be located. That makes it a lot easier for the end user, and it means that administrators don't have to go out to the desktop to do anything to get those apps installed. Later today, the folks will also learn how they can integrate their apps with the Windows Installer technology and Group Policy that makes this all possible.

Now, we also have done a lot of focus in Windows 2000 on making the whole user experience easier. And one example of that that you can see on the start menu is the new search button, which allows you to search not only from data that's local, but also data on file servers, on the Internet. And we do things even like search for printers. And this is a key usability point where users today really have to know a lot of about the network to know how to print. They need to know the network address of the printer. But by clicking find printers, I can find all the printers in my organization, and you can see I have a location here to go find it.

Now, if I'm running an application, I might have something like this color picture here I want to print. And when I go to the file menu and choose print, I really would like to find a color printer in the building I work in, so that I can print it and get that whole color image. So, I can type in six, because I work in Building 6 here, and choose on this features menu, can print color. When I do that, we search Active Directory, and we find that there are two printers in Building 6 that can print color and I have the office locations, so I know where to go and pick up my picture. So, this makes it a lot easier for end users, and developers get this automatically if they use the Windows common dial-up. They don't have to do anything extra in their applications.

Now, since we're talking about user interface, another important point is that Windows 2000 Professional is really the first multi-lingual operating system. So, for companies that have deployed operating systems supporting a lot of different languages, this makes things a lot easier. I can choose, even though I'm running English here, to switch to any of over 20 supported languages. I have a few here, and actually author documents in multiple languages, if I actually spoke any of those languages.

Even more importantly, I can log off as a user in English here, and log back on as a user who speaks Japanese. And when I do that, the Windows user interface will reconfigure itself dynamically, and present it in Japanese. Not only will it present the UI in Japanese, but any application that was built to be multi-lingual will automatically present a Japanese user interface. And people at today's event will learn about how to do that as well.

So, you can see my icons are in Japanese, the Windows 2000 help system, the Windows 2000 start menu are all in Japanese. And if I launch this Word document here, not only is Word now presenting its menus in Japanese, but of course the document itself is authored in Japanese, and will be displayed correctly, or I could choose to switch to another language, and add some English text to this as well.

So, this really makes it possible to deploy a single OS around the world, a lot lower management costs, and your applications, if they're designed to be multi-lingual, can also be deployed as a single binary, as folks will learn later today.

So, being able to have better desktop manageability, easier use, and having multi-lingual capabilities are three important points about Windows 2000 professional on the desktop.

But let's now switch and see how Windows 2000 professional makes a great mobile platform. Now, for a long time, people have wanted to use Windows NT on their laptops. They wanted the power of NT, but they've been missing two big things, power management and plug and play. In Windows 2000 Professional, not only do we support power management and plug and play, but we've also added a lot of features to make mobile users work easier.

First off, let's go down to the power management options. And you'll see here that I have full control over all of the power management settings in this computer. For example, when to turn off the monitor, hard drive, or when to go into standby. And I can collect those settings into a set of schemes. So, for example, if I don't want my laptop monitor to go out while I'm doing a presentation, I can this presentation mode on. I can also implement this hibernate mode, which allows the operating system to record all the OS state and all the application state to disk, use no power, and I can resume at any time later on, right back to where I started. So, power management is a great area of improvement in Windows 2000 Professional.

Now, another thing that mobile users are always concerned about is networking, because they're always connecting to something. And in the past, we've had network settings for things like local area networking, remote dial-in, and allowing people to dial into your own machine in three different places, and it wasn't very easy to use. What we've done in the new network connections folder is consolidated all those settings, whether I'm dialing up to Corpnet, ISP, virtual private networking, all in one spot, and we've created a new wizard that allows us to create any one of those connection types very easily. So, we think this will really improve the ease of use for mobile users running Windows 2000 Professional.

Now, another thing that mobile users would like to do when they're using Windows 2000 on the laptop is have an easier way to work with documents that they usually work with when they're connected to their network. So, here I have a network share on another machine, and before I go on the road, I'd like to take that set of documents in this folder with me. And all I have to do with Windows 2000 is to right click and say, make available offline. This will start a synchronization wizard which will pull down a local copy of all those documents, cache them, I can take them on the road, and work with them, just as is if I were connected to the network, and when I reconnect, it will automatically resynchronize the changes so that I have the same copies on both the network share and my local device. And so that will be a big improvement. And that works not only for folders, as we've done here, but for individual documents, and web pages.

The last thing that I want to point out that makes Windows 2000 Professional great on both the desktop and the laptop is better hardware support. In Windows NT 4, we didn't support some of the newer devices, like digital cameras and scanners, and we've done a lot of work in Windows 2000 Professional to support those devices. And in particular, some work done in the area of infrared. So, I've got a camera here that allows me to take a picture of you, if you'll allow me, and actually connect to the computer via infrared -- let's see, we'll frame you up here, perfect -- and beam this to the computer automatically. I just hold it up near the infrared port, and hit send, and you can see where it's connected to the laptop, and we have a dialog there showing the progress of the file transfer. And as soon as this picture is transferred, the operating system automatically places it into the user's my pictures folder with today's date.

And in the My Pictures folder, we have the ability to have a preview image, we can zoom this up and we can see that, very easily without using wires or any other devices or software, I was able to get that picture into the laptop.

So, things like power management, plug and play, easier networking, and great device support make Windows 2000 Professional really the premier mobile OS. Really this just scratches the surface of what we've done in Windows 2000. As you've said, we've done a lot of work in reliability, performance, Internet functionality, and we think the users will really like those areas, too, when they move to Windows 2000.

MR. GATES: Great. Thanks, Jeff.

MR. PRICE: You bet.

MR. GATES: Well, I can say as a user myself, I'm very excited about Windows 2000. I've had it on all my machines for the last few months, and it's been a great experience. In fact, Microsoft is running its entire business, including its Exchange Servers, SAP, everything now on Windows 2000.

Another key product for us, of course, is SQL Server. Our goal here is to really integrate into the Windows environment and provide the top scalability allowing you to have a database where you can develop an application, and it runs on a laptop all the way up to this high-end cluster that you may need for your website.

We've been the leader in things like easy administration, data warehousing capabilities, allowing tools like Office, particularly Excel, to navigate this data for rich data understanding, and it's really been great to see software developers get involved in this. This year has been a huge year for us because, with this new version, the popularity of SQL Server has risen very dramatically. We've trained now over 85,000 database administrators, and increased the installed base very dramatically.

One thing we're very proud of is the focus we've had on performance. Back in 1995, when we first got into this, we were providing about 2000 transactions per minute. That seemed pretty reasonable at the time, but in this Internet world businesses want even more. And so now we've been able to more than double the performance every year. In fact, we're on track to do even better than chip performance has increased with that exponential trend. So now we're up at over 40,000 transactions per minute. Now, let me just give you a sense of how much that is. In the course of a day that would be over 120 million transactions. And if you take the enterprises that have the most transactions, Visa credit card clearance, banks, the biggest stores in the world, they do less than a third of that in transactions. It's well more than even the New York Stock Exchange would need to do it's management. So here we have on a single machine, a Windows machine, running the latest SQL Server, enough head room that nobody is going to have to worry about whether they reach those limitations.

One thing we're also doing is constantly keeping Visual Studio up to date to take advantage of the latest in Windows and all our other products. Part of the Visual Studio relationship is that people who are registered get the updates, and so we'll be providing an update called Version 601. What we're doing here is adding some things into Visual Studio that are designed to fast track you for the best possible Windows 2000 development, showing you how we make it easier to install and manage, showing what we've done with the new COM plus, so if you want to write against the rich transaction capabilities, also something that's new is the support for clustered applications. MSCS stands for the Microsoft Clustering Services that are, of course, part of Windows 2000. Now, 601, therefore, will get you off to a fast start, building on Windows 2000.

Another part of the picture I showed up there, a piece of the puzzle, is the interoperability. Today we have SNA server out in the marketplace, and that's gone beyond just the SNA protocols to encompass database interoperability, as well. And the next version, code named Avalon, will take that even further. The newest type of interchange, and the one that we think will be the most important over time is exchanging data on the web. And that's why we invented Biz Talk. Biz Talk uses the rich capabilities of XML and standard frameworks that now over 100 companies have contributed to that Biz Talk website, putting together the schemas, the description of how information will be exchanged across various industries.

So whether it's retail, or the oil industry, or the health industry, there are frameworks out there that show how that information will be moved around. So the Biz Talk initiative is off to a very strong start, and it shows our commitment to make sure all these machines on the web can be exchanging information with each other. Now, we actually have a product that facilitates that, which is the Biz Talk Server. It's part of the interoperability product line we have, and it's there to make it easy to do the exchange, to track the status of the change, to see exactly what's going on. So we call that a business process integration tool. And then, of course, we also have our great interoperability with our rich clients, the Office and the Exchange Server, as well.

You might ask, how does this all come together, how does Windows stack up, as you're building a website, any type of new Internet application? Recently, there's been a lot of reviews that have looked at the people building application servers aimed at this marketplace, and what's really been stunning to people is to take the capabilities that are built into Windows, our transaction server, our queuing capabilities, things that we've said were important and put out for developers many years ago, they now see how appropriate those are for these applications. And, for example, when PC Week in July brought this all together they were really stunned at what was possible with the Windows platform. The cost was dramatically better, and the performance really blew away everything else. You can see here there's five or six other app type server environments, and we are way, way ahead in terms of what's available in speed, and with a hardware base that's far less expensive, because of the competition in the PC environment.

Now, this was a very, very positive review for us, and a big endorsement for people who take Visual Studio and build these applications. There was one area, however, where they gave us a bit of a hard time. And that was they said that putting out the software, the manageability, the load balancing, managing across these clusters, that was something that we needed to really beef up. And we've heard that from customers, as well. Even in our own big websites, we see that sometimes this balancing and management is not as simple as we'd like it to be. And so we took some work and made sure that it would really meet these needs. And now we're packaging that up in something that's being announced as part of this event. And that's an extension to the app server that's actually built into Windows 2000, that provides for easy deployment, easy fault tolerance, and easy load balancing. So it's all about high availability deployment, across many machines.

What's the philosophy behind this? Well, when you build a new generation application, you don't want to have a single point of failure. In fact, what you'd like to be able to do is simply add inexpensive hardware boards, rack mounted motherboards, and every time you add a new system board, you simply get better performance, and you can monitor that, see that that's taking place. If one of those boards actually stops working, any type of problem, whether it's the disk, the system, the software, whatever, because your software is written using transactions, the fact is that we can see that system is not performing, and immediately transfer the work over without any problems to the other systems. And so you get both incredible performance, that the Internet requires, and the kind of reliability that you want to have on a website.

So this scaling out is really something where the strength of the PC industry, lots of low-cost, high performance hardware, and a high volume software architecture are going to be the superior solution for all of the sites that are build on the Internet. And so really to make this come together, we've got this application server extension. And I'm going to ask Art Ford, who is the product manager, to give us a little look at how this helps make things simpler.

MR. FORD: Thank you, Bill.

So what we're looking at here on the client machine is one of these new generation web applications. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the application, because today's attendees are going to dissect this, and learn how to build it for themselves in track two of today's event. Now, we've gotten a lot of feedback in the past that applications like this are very simple to build using Visual Studio and the web application services that we've integrated into the operating system. And we've got good validation that this stuff scales really well. The PC Week numbers that you alluded to earlier really prove to the world that the best application server around is built right into NT.

Now, the challenges that users face when they're administering these type of applications really have to do with getting a handle on all the bits and pieces. So I'm excited here to preview this set of application server extensions that we hope to have available by the middle of next year. So let's take a look at this new server console. Now, unlike a traditional PC application, these web applications are kind of hard to get a hold of. There is the website that you have to worry about. There are components encapsulating your business logic running in COM plus applications, there are database connections, there are registry settings, there are security settings that you need to worry about. All told, administrators have to track about 65 bits and pieces of these web applications. What this new product allows us to do is it provides a single application image, that brings all of those bits and pieces together into an integrated management console so I can manage them from a single spot. We're also providing integrated performance analysis and monitoring tools, so I can see how my application is doing more holistically.

So let's assume that we've got the management of this application under control, the single application image is going to go a long way for that. What we want to talk about now is capacity. Now, you alluded to these things called clusters earlier, where let's say I've got my application running really well on this single box, what I want to be able to do, to add capacity, is just add an off the shelf piece of hardware, a very inexpensive piece of hardware. Now, today that's really complicated. You have to actually go through additional software installations, and all those 65 bits and pieces actually have to be synchronized across all the machines in the cluster, very difficult to manage. What this new set of extensions is going to do is allow me to add a new server to my cluster very, very simply. And what you'll see here is that this application server extension automatically takes all the files, components and configuration settings, and replicates them to the new machine. So, as indicated here, my cluster, we actually have this machine -- this application now running on two different machines. So let's take a look at what that looks like from the client standpoint.

As I continue running to this machine, what you'll see is that that header at the top of the page is actually going to change colors, showing red and blue. Now, we've done that for the purpose of this demonstration to show dynamic load balancing. In effect, the end user sees a single application, but we're using two different boxes in the back end to serve the application. That allows us virtually unlimited capacity. So that as usage continues to increase, we can add more and more boxes, and get unlimited capacity for our web applications.

Now, one of the other benefits of this type of configuration is a built-in degree of fault tolerance. So for mission critical systems, you never want your website to go down, ever, it's just got to be up all the time. But, in reality, hardware can fail, networks can fail, applications can fail. And you want to have a system that gracefully manages those failures, without interrupting service to the end users. So what I want to do is switch over to that new server. And I'm going to simulate a catastrophic failure there. What we've got here is a small application that is going to simulate a memory leak on our server machine. And when I enter in this -- I'm going to have it crash in about 15 seconds and launch it. Now, I want to go over and look at the management console and see what happens.

From the management console, we're constantly monitoring the health of all the servers in our cluster. And so when one of them hits a critically low memory threshold, as it's done here, the administrator is going to be alerted, and we can automatically take that machine out of the cluster. Now, as you can see here, we've disabled the problem machine. But, all the additional load has now been transferred to the remaining machine in the cluster. So let's take a look at what the client sees. Even though one of our machines has gone down, you can see that the application continues to function, without interruption. We're providing that extra degree of reliability and high availability that's required for these mission critical systems. So let's go back over to the server once more.

The problem that we have, as it exists right now, is that we're only really hitting on half of our cylinders, so to speak. We're only running at half capacity, because one of our machines has been damaged. What this set of server extensions can do is proactively go out and fix the problem for you. It provides a self-healing environment that can, for example, restart the application on the problem server, and then bring it back into the cluster. For the purposes of this demonstration it's a little bit simpler for me simply to go ahead and shut down that problem application and restore the health. When we go over to the management console, what you'll see is that we detect that the memory leak has been fixed, and we automatically bring that machine back into the cluster. There we go.

So I hope I've been able to show you these three key benefits of this set of application server extensions. The first was vastly simplified administration through that single application image. The second is virtually unlimited capacity through your web applications, through this very simple clustering mechanism. And the third is a bulletproof fault tolerant environment, so your web application never goes down.

MR. GATES: That's fantastic. Thanks a lot.

MR. FORD: Thanks, Bill.

MR. GATES: The basic idea there is that these web applications are going to require more scale than even the biggest applications of the past. And this clustering approach allows you to have that scale, at low cost, the same time you get up to incredibly high levels of reliability. And yet, you don't have to think about it when you write the application, as long as you're using the component approach that has transactions built in, all of that comes for free, so you can go up to the limits of how many transactions are coming into your business.

Now, Microsoft's commitment to developers is to make sure the pieces are really coming together, and to make sure that we're constantly getting your feedback on how to improve these products. And so we wrap that all together in what we call MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network. We're keeping that information up to date on the web, all the time. And a particular emphasis now is making sure that we're showing you sample applications, applications that match the kind of challenges you're trying to solve. In fact, we hope that you'll be able to go up and just steal code from those applications and be able to be far more productive. Another new focus is allowing members to communicate with each other in some new ways.

Let's go ahead and take a look at some of these capabilities.

MR. : Thanks, Bill. Well, Bill, most developers attending Dev Days are already pretty aware that MSDN Online can be a great resource for keeping up with the latest technologies. So what I'd like to focus on today is how we can use some of the community features of MSDN Online, like Members Helping Members, to help developers connect with each other and solve problems together. So let's go to the website.

This is the Members Helping Members homepage on MSDN Online, and you can find this under the community section of the navigation bar from any page within the site. What we can do right off the bat is two things. We can register ourselves as an expert, and make ourselves available to help others in the community, or we could search. Let's go ahead and start a search. Now, Bill, say you and I are looking for a developer who is an ADO expert, who also can program in Visual Basic, it should be something pretty easy for us to find here. I'm going to go to my topic index here on the left, and select data access and databases, since ADO is a data access technology, add ADO to our search. Now, notice down here at the bottom of the page, before I even hit the search button, that Members Helping Members has queried the database and displayed the number of developers that my search will result in. So in this case we've got 1,457 ADO experts, which is pretty impressive, but it's going to be hard to find a developer out of that big list of people to send our questions to. So let's narrow our search further.

From the topic index we'll choose languages and development tools, and add Visual Basic to our criteria here. Now, notice down at the bottom left hand part of the screen that members helping members is displaying the technologies that we've selected, so that we don't lose track of what we're doing in our query. It's also adjusted the number of developers here, we've gone down from about 1,400 to 1,200, which is still a pretty big group of people. So let's make this a little more interesting. Let's say that we want a very specific search criteria, that our ADO developer who knows Visual Basic should also live near us here in the Northwest, in case we ever want to get together with him some time. And also speaks another language other than English. So it's a pretty complex query, but we can do that, that's the power of members helping members, we can refine things down to very specific criteria.

So from our additional search restrictions, we can add a language, how about Chinese in this case, and a geography. Since we live in Seattle we'll take the Northwest United States, and you can see this brought us down to just three developers who meet our very specific search criteria. It would be hard to go out into a news group and find a developer who meets these very specific criteria. So let's go ahead and search. Now, we've returned the result set of the three developers here. We've got names, we've got you, Jackie, and Chris, we'll go ahead and expand on Jackie and learn a little bit more about her. We can see that she's a consultant here in the Northwest, has worked for 12 years in an enterprise development company, has got the ADO skills, the VB skills, a pretty impressive technical palate I'd say. So let's go ahead and send our question off to her.

So now we'll get on with the business of actually writing our question. We'll enter in our subject. And you can see Members Helping Members has pre-populated my email address and phone number based on my previous registration. I'm going to take my phone number out until I get to know if Jackie can help me better here. And we'll go ahead and enter in a question that I've already written in advance to save us some time, and we'll send it off to Jackie. So hopefully we'll hear from Jackie soon.

So, Bill, another interesting thing about Members Helping Members is it's actually a great example of a three tiered web application. On the client side we're using dynamic HTML, on the server we're using Windows NT 4, and Internet Information Server, and we're connecting through to a SQL 7 database, using ADO. We're managing all the mail through Exchange. So it's not only a useful application for developers, but we've also posted a case study up online for developers to see how we've put this application together.

So I hope you can see that Members Helping Members is a great way for developers to connect with each other online and solve problems together, using this community feature of MSDN Online.

MR. GATES: Great.

MR. : Thanks very much for your time.

MR. GATES: Super

MR. GATES: Well, the next 12 months are going to be very exciting. We've really been ramping up our R&D investments to address these new applications. On the database side, we're going to have a new release of SQL Server, we'll have a very major release of Exchange Server, that comes soon after Windows 2000. Interoperability, I talked about Biz Talk, we'll have the first release of that coming out in the next generation SNA server called Babylon, and in then in the middle-ware area we have this application server extension that runs on top of Windows 2000, that makes the load balancing and deployment very, very simple, and also updates to our commerce server, so sites that are trying to build catalogues and do e-commerce, we make that a lot simpler, as well.

And so what we're doing is really activating our community, putting up the sample applications, driving those tools forward, to make sure all of you can build these applications that are really changing the world in exciting ways. Our commitment is to continue to build these easy tools, to provide the highest performance. I've got that three times there, because when our guys wake up in the morning that's what they're thinking about, and we really love the idea that the PC architecture has the best scaling. It's the way that you avoid the single point of failure, as well as avoiding those single, monolithic boxes that don't have the same rich development tools that have grown up in the PC environment.

We're very big on integration, making sure that whether it's somebody sitting there with Office who wants to navigate the data, somebody who wants to see how that website is being used, that is very straightforward. And more and more the elements that you need for XML, for doing transactions, for doing the rich security, we're making sure we provide those components so you can focus on the things that are very unique about the solution that you're trying to put together. So we're really pleased with the great feedback and support we're getting from all of you. And I'm very excited to see the applications you'll be able to put together with these new products.

Thank you.

(End of event.)