LEAD TECHNOLOGIES ANNOUNCES A BETA RELEASE OF LEADTOOLS
FOR THE MICROSOFT .NET FRAMEWORK

Charlotte, NC (June 18, 2001) - LEAD Technologies, Inc., developer of the award-winning LEADTOOLS line of imaging developer toolkits, today announced at Microsoft Tech·Ed 2001, a beta of its LEADTOOLS imaging toolkit for the Microsoft .NET Framework. LEADTOOLS is a family of comprehensive developer toolkits designed to help programmers integrate raster, document, medical, multimedia, vector and Internet imaging functionality into their applications quickly and easily. The result of ten years of development, LEADTOOLS toolkits literally put millions of lines of code at the fingertips of application developers, encompassing support for features like file import/export, image acquisition, image transformation and processing, display, compression, database connectivity, and much more. The Microsoft .NET Framework is an advanced, high-productivity development environment that features integrated SOAP support and deep support for multiple programming-languages. LEADTOOLS for Microsoft .NET allows developers to create applications that include comprehensive imaging and/or compression functionality, and move them from development to implementation more quickly. The combined rich imaging capabilities of LEADTOOLS and the Microsoft .NET Framework's increased reliability pave the way for the creation of an image enhanced web user experience.

Andreas Freeman, Manager of Developer Support at LEAD Technologies, Inc. states, "We are excited to be going into beta with a product which takes full advantage of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Our customers appreciate the ease of integrating imaging functionality with LEADTOOLS. Simpler is better, and we believe that ASP.Net's control development environment will be embraced by our customers in large part for this reason."

"Microsoft is delighted to be working with LEAD Technologies to offer customers many exciting new imaging products that enhance development on the Microsoft .NET Framework," said Marie Huwe, director of Developer Tools at Microsoft Corp. "LEADTOOLS and the Microsoft .NET Framework will make it easy for developers to create rich image-enabled Web applications and Web services."

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About LEAD Technologies, Inc.
Founded in 1990, LEAD grew out of years of research headed by Moe Daher to find a comprehensive compression standard for digital images. LEAD is now the world-leading supplier of imaging development toolkits, providing technology of the future, today. LEAD brings to the market the most innovative and technically superior products that provide the greatest possible value for its customers. LEAD’s award winning imaging technology is chosen by Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Boeing, Xerox and thousands of other companies for use in their high volume applications and internal systems.