Newsreel
  Products & Services
  Web Watch
  Software Update
  Resource Directory
  Events Diary
  Articles
  The Magazine
  Subscribe
  Contact Us

  Search DNJ Online

Best of PDC goes to Israel

Neora Shem-Shaul attends the cut-down version of the Professional Developers Conference held in Tel Aviv earlier this year.

Displaying Hebrew Text
Windows CE and COM+

10 Feb - Last time Microsoft's Steve Balmer and John Leftwich visited Israel they made it clear they not only loved the weather and the beaches, but were also impressed with the high-tech nature of the Israeli community, both in developing state-of-the-art applications and in the adoption of current technologies by both organisations and individuals.
      The result has been enhanced relations between Microsoft and Israeli developers through the MSDN ISV research and development programme, and a series of events which took place in Israel at the beginning of 1999. Most significant was the Best of PDC (Professional Developers Conference) event which took place 10 February here in Tel Aviv.
      This was quite a gathering. Some 700 people registered and 800 arrived to listen to the messages brought by the gurus from Seattle. Marshall Goldberg, lead program manager for the developer relations group at Microsoft Corp, gave the opening talk. Goldberg, functioning as the main evangelist for Windows 2000, describes himself as a 'Utopian of the Net' and believes the Internet revolution improves the way people communicate and operate in modern times.
      Goldberg's presentation was called 'Building Windows based applications for the Internet Age' and took the audience through the evolution of the Windows platform, starting from personal productivity, through the client/server architecture and on to the creation of distributed applications and n-tier architectures. Goldberg suggested: "Microsoft is combining the best of the PC with the best of the Web in order to reduce application deployment and management costs, and make it easier to build distributed applications."
      "Start today," was Goldberg's concluding message. "Use the infrastructure services in Windows NT Service Pack 4 and encapsulate your business logic as COM+ components. Your investment is secure with Windows 2000 because Windows DNA will be the major platform for developing distributed multi-tier applications." This is where the other speakers picked up.

Plenty of local companies could be seen in the exhibition

The day proceeded with streams covering Windows 2000, COM+ and Internet development, together with hands-on lab sessions covering COM+, Dynamic HTML, SQL Server 7 and Windows DNA - some operated by the local Oracle training centre. Local vendors such as UI and KRF-Tech, with its WinDriver toolkit, were to be seen in the exhibition.
      Marc Kuperstein, technical evangelist for the Microsoft DRG team, gave some very professional lectures covering the new APIs, the advantages COM+ offers for developing applications, and more. However some of the attendees found the technical English made it difficult for them to fully understand new concepts. Here the Israeli speakers, delivering their talks in Hebrew, came into their own.
      Israel Kehatt, a senior teacher from High-Tech college, talked about COM+ internals. Kehatt demonstrated how COM+ combines the Component Object Model with the automatic services offered by Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and how easy it should become to support piped data transfer, GUI unification and object manipulation using Visual J++ 6.0 and Windows Foundation Classes (WFC).
      Ariel Kirchuck from Netposition, an Israeli company which develops Web sites, gave a session on XML with a thorough demonstration of the use of DOM (Document Object Model). Meir Mendelowitz had some useful tips on Dynamic HTML, Active Server Pages (ASP) and the use of Visual Basic 6.0 for developing and debugging WebClasses.
      With this suite of tools it seems that finally the Web has become a development environment, and not just a design environment. Until now, native HTML has been an unpleasant platform for software developers who have adopted object-oriented technologies and need to use database services - even with the evolution of Java. One could see the appreciation on delegates' faces as they realised how they can use these new features.
      The next day Microsoft held a seminar for research and development managers, emphasising the new MSDN ISV programme and the special opportunities it offers start-up companies. The first technical talk of the day focused on the new capabilities of Windows 2000 and the enhancements it offers developers, such as improved directory services, enhanced favourite list (which displays tiny previews), the Buddy list which attempts to imitate ICQ (the Web utility that tells you if your friends or colleagues are online), self-healing applications, natural language queries, and the operating system's improved understanding of who the user is, where he is and what platform he is using.
      Microsoft also announced Windows NT Embedded which is to be released this year and is being developed at Microsoft R&D centre in Haifa, here in Israel. This product will enable system designers to select which components from the operating system to embed on their target platform, so minimising the footprint, while enjoying the benefits of a well-known platform for users and for developers (US company VenturCom has tools available now that do something similar).

July 99 - As reported live from Amsterdam. More

May 99 - Full report on Microsoft UK's Student DevDay event. More

Nov 98 - Dave Chadwick reports from the ActiveStore conference in Amsterdam. More

July 98 - Full coverage from Nice, France, reported as it happened. More