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After a busy couple of days, I have had the chance to digest and reflect on all the Indigo information that was slinged at us in San Francisco.

It started with a keynote about Indigo from Eric Rudder and the shock and awe demonstration of Indigo's simplicity. He showed how a secure and reliable distributed Hello World app with 57,000 lines of code will be reduced to just 3 lines of code in Indigo. Regardless of the contrived example, it received a solid round of applause. During a demo with Ari Bixhorn, it was apparent the message tracing will be a first class citizen in the first release of Indigo. A message tracing tool, which had an eerie similarity to a well known wse trace tool, was used throughout the demo. And of course, the big announcement was that an Indigo CTP will be released with an upcoming VS2005 beta2 release in March. He did firmly mention that it will be released in March, whether that be March 30th or March 43rd it will be released.

Next was the packed "Programming with Indigo" session with Steve Swartz and Don Box. Sorry, a quick diversion; it seems like the indigo crew might be working EA type hours or involved with one hell of diet plan. Weight loss was very evident. Anyway, they showed an ever maturing programming model and reintroduced us all to our ABC's.

A couple things caught my attention during the talk: First, I am ecstatic about the unification of Microsoft's distributed technologies. The unification was never more obvious then when they discussed bindings and the ease to compose the different transports through custom bindings. It is a truly powerful feature. A lot was said about working with contracts in Indigo and one particular phrase from Don Box resonated with me, "the contract is the spine of Indigo". I would go a step further and say the contract is the spine of service orientation in general. This is why I agree with the contract first development mindset and violently agree with the advice that SOA doesn't stand for "Special Object Annotations". While it might be somewhat disheartening to see Indigo rely on these "annotations", the slow metamorphosis of moving from a WebMethod to a more distinct service declaration (e.g, interface attribution and configuration) is encouraging. I would envision as Indigo matures we might see different layers that sit on top of Indigo that will further enhance the distinction between SO and OO.

 Doug Purdy's security talk discussed general security aspects and tied them to Indigo through the CIA acronym. He articulated that Indigo is secured by default and you must modify the bindings to remove certain security features. Another interesting piece he discussed was that an infrastructure called XSI (Xml Security Infrastructure) is under development. The infrastructure will provide a foundation for developing security tokens claims and other related security artifacts.

Over lunch, I stopped at the Indigo booth and discussed some interesting topics with Richard Turner ranging from cross appdomain support, dynamic policies to how Indigo will handle the fragility of supporting maturing specifications. I will drill down into a couple of this topics in future posts.

The "Biztalk and Indigo" talk was mainly focused on BT 2004 and not so much on Indigo. I was hoping to hear some information regarding how the future releases of Biztalk would leverage Indigo internally. They did mention that when the Indigo CTP is released Microsoft will offer an open source Indigo adapter for BT 2004. Should be an interesting example of Indigo's abilities.

 Overall, from the first glimpses of a much cleaner programming model to the incriminating pictures of Don Box and company it was a worthwhile investment.