February 9, 2005 .net

Watch Eric Rudder’s VSLive Indigo Keynote

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.”

By far my favorite part of this presentation (except for watching Ari’s heart beat at 155bpm) was watching Eric show the small transitions needed to move existing code to Indigo from ASMX, Enterprise Services, WSE2, MSMQ and Remoting and how well Indigo will integrate with BizTalk and SQL Server in the future. I’m sure it won’t all be changing attributes and removing extraneous code, but if the majority of the porting work fits that model, I’ll be impressed indeed. Of course, as Eric says, there’s no requirement to move your code to Indigo if you don’t want to; the goal of the Indigo team is to make it smooth if you want to.

And finally, Eric says that we’ll be releasing a new WinFX CTP in March, which will include both Avalon and Indigo (although it may be March 38th or March 43rd : ).