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Indigo Offers Unified Development
Learn how Indigo will simplify the development of distributed applications.
by Donis Marshall

VSLive! San Francisco, February 8, 2005

Watch the video of the keynote! (Running time: 57 minutes, 32 seconds)

Eric Rudder (left), Microsoft's Senior Vice President of Servers and Tools, with Ari Bixhorn, Lead Product Manager of Microsoft's Web Services Strategy

Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, showed off Indigo at this morning's VSLive! keynote. Indigo, Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented applications, is a key component of Microsoft's next Windows release (code-named Longhorn). Rudder asserted that Indigo will provide improved interoperability and productivity, as well as a more flexible security model for developers creating service-oriented applications. He also noted that Indigo will make it easier to build secure, reliable, transacted Web services.

Support for WS-* specifications and compatibility with existing Microsoft distributed application technologies form the basis of Indigo's interoperability. Indigo can communicate using Web services protocols to speak to any platform that supports Web services, said Ari Bixhorn, Lead Product Manager of Microsoft's Web Services Strategy. Bixhorn demonstrated a patient-tracking solution for a hospital, in which data from monitoring devices would be pumped into an Indigo service and sent out to multiple clients. He then added a Web service for patient prescription data that ran on BEA WebLogic, graphically illustrating how you can use Indigo to interoperate seamlessly with non-Indigo services.

Improved productivity is another design goal of Indigo, which features Visual Studio 2005 integration and attribute-based development. Indigo drastically reduces the amount of code necessary to create Web services features, said Bixhorn. Rudder illustrated the code reduction by showing different instantiations of a Hello World program. As an XML Web Services application, the program consisted of 56,000 lines of source code. With Web Services Enhancements (WSE), the amount of code fell to 27,000. With Indigo, the program contained only three lines of code.

Rudder acknowledged that the success of Indigo will be linked closely to how well it implements security. "We wanted to get security right," said Rudder. "Security had to be flexible enough to fit in with multiple models." Encryption, X.509 certifications, and role-based security are available in Indigo either as attributes or through the application configuration file. Plus, Indigo's extensibility allows you to substitute an alternate security mechanism. For example, Bixhorn changed the transport in the hospital application from TCP to HTTP with only a few lines of code, opening up the system to the Web.

Depending strictly on HTTP led to reliability issues in the app, such as dropped packets. Bixhorn solved this problem by using attributes with Indigo to include guaranteed delivery. He also used attributes to encrypt the outgoing messages, which were sent in clear text initially. Together, these changes illustrate how Microsoft hopes to provide improved messaging reliability and security with Indigo.

As a unified programming model, Indigo aggregates and provides a consistent interface for the various remoting solutions currently available in .NET, including XML Web Services, .NET Remoting, and Enterprise Services. Rudder encouraged developers to prepare for Indigo today by building services using ASMX, using WSE for WS-* support, using System.Messaging for asynchronous queued messaging, and using Enterprise Services for transaction support. Migration to Indigo from most of these technologies will be straightforward, said Rudder.

Microsoft will make a WinFX Community Tech Preview (CTP) available in March, which will include an Indigo CTP, a second Avalon CTP (following up on the first release in November), and a build of Visual Studio 2005.

About the Author
Donis Marshall is a premier and recognized trainer of computer technology to developers and scientists, and an endorsed trainer for Microsoft Global Learning Services. His most recent book for Microsoft Press, Programming Microsoft® Visual C#® 2005 Core Reference, will be published this fall. Reach Donis at donis@gotechnical.com.