The two will participate in a 75-minute joint interview in front of a gathering of tech executives.  The conference is sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, a unit of Dow Jones & Co.

At the conference, the arch-rivals CEOs and visonaries will conduct their first public face-to-face discussion.  Jobs and Gates have historically have been at odds over issues critical to the technology industry.

Apple and Microsoft have different in their philosophy and approach to bringing technology, software, and user experience to customers.  Jobs' view is that "hardware- and software-product design be closely integrated from the start" reports Shinal.  Apple has revitalized itself thanks to the iPod, new generation of Intel Macs, and many expect the pending release of the iPhone to continue that trend.  The same can be said of the upcoming Leopard operating system, Mac OS X version 10.5.

Also scheduled to speak at the conference are "Star Wars" creator George Lucas, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, AOL founder Steve Case, Microsoft's Ballmer, US Senator John McCain, PalmPilot inventor Jeff Hawkins, Cisco Systems Inc. CEO John Chambers as well as others.

You can read more at the marketwatch web site here.

To learn more about the D -- All Things Digital Conference click here