64-bit Windows Coming Soon

Today at the Professional Developers Conference Bill Gates announced the availability of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.5 technologies to rev the engine of the conference participants. Not only did he speak on Microsoft's .Net strategy along with that, but also gave developers a glimpse of 64-bit Windows technologies and the software driver devlopment kit.

Gates told attendees, "the Internet Explorer 5.5 development platform is the best path forward for Web developers preparing for .NET as it offers the ability to develop reusable components for use across the Internet, providing the first steps toward creating rich services on the Web," as he highlighted key new features to make development on the IE 5.5 platform easier and more robust.

The availability of an updated driver development kit and a technology preview of the 64-bit Windows system was also announced by Gates at the conference. According to MS officials, the system is 95% feature complete, and will be sent to those 5,000 people currently testing Intel's Itanium processor. Systems with the workstation version of the software may trickle into the market by the end of this year.

For more information visit Microsoft.