LAS VEGAS -- Bill Gates used his Comdex keynote address here Sunday night to reiterate the company's plans for the C# programming language and to give an estimated 15,000 attendees a first look at Microsoft's latest technology, the Tablet PC.

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Gates said Microsoft has fulfilled its promise to submit the C# programming language and the .NET framework, the backbone of its ambitious .NET initiative, to the European Computer Manufacturers' Association (ECMA).

C#, an object-oriented programming language based on C++, is a conceptual rival to Sun Microsystems' Java in that it is designed to have "write once, run anywhere" capabilities, according to Microsoft officials. Despite this, CEO Steve Ballmer said after the keynote that Microsoft would include Java in its development framework, but added that he was doubtful that Sun would relinquish enough control over the language for Java to be supported within the .NET framework.

A Sun official, in turn, was not convinced that Microsoft is wholeheartedly trying to make C# or .NET truly open standards.

"Our feeling is that submitting portions of a product in development doesn't necessarily mean the product should be standardized," said David Harrah, a spokesman from Sun Microsystems, in Palo Alto, Calif.

Harrah continued that at this point some components of .NET and the Common Runtime Language are proprietary. Further, to be an open standard, the source code should be available, and the APIs should be open for everyone to use and write to, according to Harrah.

Referring to the first beta version of the programming language VisualStudio.net, which shipped to 10,000 developers last Friday, Gates proclaimed a new generation of development tools with language innovation as the centerpiece.

Currently, exchanges use a technology called "Punch out," which allows buy-side marketplace buyers to click on a supplier's catalog and actually be placed on the supplier's Web site while still within the marketplace framework. This is the technology that Microsoft is promoting and Visual Studio.net will help create.

"This is an advanced language created out of the need to deploy XML and dynamic Web services where developers will have to compete on implementation of services, not on languages," Gates said.

Gates laid out a scenario where a developer creating a travel Web site would go to sites such as Dollar Rent a Car and Galileo International, which already offer Web services, and pick out some of those sites' services to incorporate as links into his or her own Web site.

Later Ballmer explained that a company would naturally need to have a prior business arrangement with any site from which it grabbed its services.

Gates further emphasized the importance of XML as the linchpin to a technology that he said goes beyond anything the industry has seen in the past, including mainframe-to-terminal, peer-to-peer, client-server, or even distributed computing.

"Peer-to-peer is an extreme that says we don't need a server," Gates said.

"Instant messaging is fantastic, Napster has a lot to show us, but we can't be pure client-oriented," Gates added.

Gates, who now holds the titles chief software architect and chairman of the board of Microsoft, put on an old-fashioned dog and pony show, bringing up on stage various product managers to show off the Tablet PC and other technologies, including some of the flashier new features coming up in the next version of Microsoft Office, to be introduced next year.

The Tablet PC had a number of features that brought appreciative cheers from a sophisticated audience of technologists.

The pen-based user interface was especially well received. The 1-inch thick tablet, with built-in wireless LAN capabilities, was able to keep up with the demonstrator's handwriting -- the words seemingly flowed onto the LCD screen as quickly as they were written. In addition, although the demonstrator was using cursive handwriting, the text was easily reformatted, creating bold or italic paragraphs, adding space between paragraphs, and even using a search feature to find a particular word.

Another Tablet PC feature that brought spirited applause from the audience was something called Direct Manipulation, which will allow users to point to something, move it across files, and eventually pass it off to other devices, for example from Tablet PC to a whiteboard display.

The tablet, still in prototype, is envisioned as a fully functioning PC with at least a 500MHz processor, 128MB of RAM, multiple gigabytes of storage, and an 8.5-inch-by-11-inch screen that will include Microsoft's eBook file technology. Volume shipments of the Tablet PC are not expected until 2002 at the earliest.

The company has been working in earnest since July of last year on the device, which will be manufactured by computer makers, according to Alex Loeb, general manager of Microsoft's Tablet PC, in Redmond, Wash. Technologies such as the handwriting recognition have been in development at the software giant for a number of years, she added.

"We're keeping our fingers crossed that the device appears sometime in 2002," Loeb said. "It's a lot of work." In terms of the identities of the Tablet PC OEMs, major laptop manufacturers are the most likely suspects, she added, with the device costing about the same price as laptops.

Microsoft is also intending to include its speech-recognition technology in Tablet PC devices from "day one," according to Loeb. "My theory is that there's a very vocal minority who want speech," she said. The company may also use speech as another user interface for the devices, Loeb added.

Currently, there are a couple of hundred Tablet PC prototypes in existence and Microsoft is already talking to computer manufacturers about the devices, Loeb said. Microsoft's core Tablet PC development team is about 100 people, but factoring in the company's use of its other technologies in the device, the number of company staff involved in the project is anywhere between several hundred and a thousand employees, she added.

Microsoft eventually plans to use the Tablet PC technology as basis for whiteboard-size devices, but development is not yet underway, according to Loeb.

Charlton Lui, Microsoft's development manager for Tablet PC, said the device will also run games and will operate as a full-function laptop. He mentioned that Microsoft research had revealed that more than 50 percent of people get irritated by the noise their colleagues make when typing on their laptops at meetings, a problem that Tablet PC's pen-based interface is designed to resolve.

Gates' keynote was not entirely devoted to the Tablet PC, however. Microsoft Office executive Tom Bailey was called onto the stage to demonstrate new features -- SmartTags and Task Panes -- that will be available next year in the next version of Office.

Smart Tags is the next step in Microsoft's Wizard technology, which monitors a user's keystrokes and anticipates what the user might want to do next, popping up options while the user works. Smart Tags takes this concept one stage further, as it is designed to make what might be called intelligent guesses.

This feature will be customizable, according to Bailey, and used by vertical industries and professionals to help with routine tasks that are specific to their industry. For example, the legal profession could customize it to make the creation of legal documents more intuitive and easier to integrate with other documents, or Smart Tags could be programmed to ask someone working on a citation whether he or she wanted to search the Web for other similar citations.

Task Panes aggregates features that were already found in Office but were hidden too deeply inside drop-down menus to be easily found, according to Bailey. Task Panes makes these features, which include "universal selection" and "change of paragraphs," more accessible.

The big news about these features was saved for off-stage when Ballmer said that Smart Tags, for example, would eventually find its way out of Office and into the operating system.

Microsoft will also release a new groupware application in the form of a pre-built Web site called SharePoint. SharePoint will allow remote users to suggest and annotate documents and designs, while the project manager, for example, can view all of the suggestions and accept any number of the changes in order to create the final document. Microsoft Word will have an option that allows users to save a file as a SharePoint document. SharePoint will be available next year.