Maritz said these and other announcements to be made at the weeklong developers conference play a role in helping developers as they begin to engage a new era of opportunity brought about by technical advancements in Internet technology.

"The third generation of the Internet will change the way we build applications in as significant a way as the Internet already has over the past five years," Maritz said. "As far as we think we've come, we're really only at the beginning. This is a great time to be in this industry, and we are excited about the opportunity to take the industry to the next level."

In describing the third generation of the Internet, Maritz said the Internet would be an intrinsic part of an off-the-shelf infrastructure, allowing developers to increasingly focus on adding value to their applications and services infrastructure. Business-to-business communications and e-commerce will be key motivators as will lowering total cost of ownership without forsaking existing investments. Applications will be richer and will provide more value to users without sacrificing reach. The ability to connect intelligent appliances and evolving business models to support the idea of software as a service will be other hallmarks of the Internet's third generation.

Maritz promised that Microsoft will continue its investment in all of the critical building blocks that will enable the development of the third generation of Internet applications, including a comprehensive applications platform, integrated development tools and interoperability with other platforms and applications.

Maritz also reiterated Microsoft's commitment to providing the information, resources and training developers need to build next-generation applications via MSDN™, the Microsoft Developer Network. He demonstrated the recently updated MSDN Online "developer portal" Web site, which allows developers to customize the information they receive from MSDN, connects developers with industry experts and peers around the world, offers 16 new Online Special-Interest Groups (OSIGs), and provides instant access to training and support resources.

BizTalk Framework Specifications, Steering Committee and Web Site Announced

Microsoft announced the availability of draft BizTalk Framework specifications for industry comment. The specifications outline design guidelines for developing and implementing BizTalk Framework schemas and provides organizations with an initial blueprint for building BizTalk-enabled software. By creating BizTalk Framework schemas, customers can fully realize the interoperability of XML to share information among applications, between companies and across industries.

Microsoft also announced BizTalk.Org and the BizTalk steering committee to accelerate the development and adoption of the BizTalk Framework for e-commerce and applications integration. BizTalk.Org is a new public Web site located at http://www.biztalk.org/ that provides tools, information and infrastructure to help customers define and deploy their own BizTalk Framework schemas. It also serves as an open repository for posting and finding BizTalk Framework schemas. The BizTalk steering committee is composed of industry-leading vendors, standards bodies and corporate customers whose charter is to manage the BizTalk.Org Web site and provide guidance on the future direction of the BizTalk Framework. BizTalk steering committee members include Ariba Inc., The Baan Co., Boeing, Commerce One Inc., Concur Technologies Inc., Data Interchange Standards Association, J.D. Edwards & Co., Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Open Applications Group (OAG), PeopleSoft Inc., Pivotal and SAP AG.

NSTL Tests Demonstrate Enterprise Strength of Windows DNA Development Model

Today, NSTL Inc., an independent testing organization, released results on its Web site of tests that demonstrate the maturity and enterprise-strength scalability of the Windows DNA development model for distributed Web-based applications. The results of the test demonstrate the ability of the Microsoft Visual Studio development system and the Windows NT^® Server operating system to create and run high-traffic, dynamic Web applications.

Microsoft also announced the availability of MSDE for Visual Studio 6.0. MSDE is a fully SQL Server 7.0-compatible data engine for building mobile and shared solutions that easily migrate to SQL Server 7.0. Solutions built with MSDE for Visual Studio 6.0 are freely distributable and leverage the enterprise-class reliability and features of SQL Server. MSDE for Visual Studio 6.0 is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/msde/ for developers using any Visual Studio 6.0 Professional or Enterprise language tool.

Vendor Initiative to Create Open Data Mining Specification

Microsoft also announced a new vendor initiative to extend OLE DB, providing software vendors and application developers with an open data access interface to more efficiently integrate data mining tools and applications. A joint effort between the Microsoft SQL Server development group and Microsoft Research, OLE DB for data mining is an example of Microsoft's commitment to delivering leading-edge technology to the developer community. Data mining technology provides sophisticated analysis and knowledge-discovery capabilities for applications such as data warehouses and customer relationship management systems.

Microsoft Tech·Ed is an annual developers conference that provides education and training on current technology offerings from Microsoft and gives attendees in-depth information and training on how to integrate various Microsoft and third-party technologies into their solutions. This year's Tech·Ed sponsors include Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Seagate Software, Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems Inc., Sterling Software Inc. and VERITAS Software Corp.

The Microsoft Tech·Ed conference is one of many resources Microsoft provides to developers via MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network, to help them benefit from the business opportunities enabled by innovations to the Windows platform. A complete listing of MSDN programs, events and resources can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/.