Developers offered a day with Gates

Approximately 45,000 developers from around the world would participated in Microsoft's (Redmond, WA, http://www.microsoft.com) "Developer Days" series that began on March 19. The event, hosted at 95 sites in more than 45 countries worldwide, featured the public unveiling of a new development system, Visual Studio 97 and a keynote address by CEO Bill Gates.

Technical sessions on Microsoft visual tools and technologies addressed specific development needs, while Gates discussed the role of Microsoft's visual tools in integrating client-server and the Internet.

Following the keynote, developers were given demonstrations of ActiveX technologies, the component object model (COM) and the distributed version of COM (DCOM).