Paul Ballard provides a nice summary of the Indigo Day at VSLive. I especially like the acronyms that the Indigo boys were using; the ABCs of Indigo and the CIA of security are damned easy to remember!

″David Chappell provides an architectural overview of ‘Indigo,’ Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. The paper covers Indigo’s relationship to existing distributed application technologies in the .NET Framework, the basics of creating and consuming Indigo services, and an overview of Indigo’s capabilities, including security, reliable messaging, and transaction support.”

The first article of a new Indigo programming model since PDC03 (and hopefully the one that’ll stick : ).

It’s become apparent to me that for Microsoft-focused non-Microsoft hosted conferences, VSLive is it. I know that in the past that they’ve had financial problems, but I haven’t heard rumors of that for a while. Even more importantly, their attendance numbers and their coverage is top notch for 3rd party Windows developer conferences. If I was going to speak at a wide-reach Windows developer conference that wasn’t a TechEd or a PDC, VSLive would be it.

″Somasegar says a key component of continuing this momentum is creating ‘connected systems’ that work together by using smart clients. ‘Let’s take the best from the Web client world and the best from the rich client world, and—voila!—you have a smart client,’ Somasegar says. Smart clients can allow several applications to share code with one another while using minimal resources, eliminating the need to duplicate coding efforts; essentially, if one application requires a piece of code existing already in another application, it simply can request the code to be sent over. ‘The cheapest piece of code is the piece of code that you don’t have to write in the first place,’ Somasegar says, as smart clients provide interoperability through Web services and leverage existing investments. ‘Enabling developers to reuse existing assets is a key design goal.’ The end result of using a smart client, ultimately, is a rich user experience that requires using minimal resources.”

″If you looked at the PDC 2003 Indigo bits, you will notice that the [Indigo] programming model changed quite a bit. I think that in fact, every single element of the programming model changed since then. And all for the better. The programming model is so intuitive by now that I am (almost) tempted to say ‘Alright, understood, next technology, please.’”

″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 : ).

If you’re not familiar with the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute (pronounced “apt-ka” by those in the know…) or worse, if you just apply it ’til stuff works, you need to read this blog post from Shawn Farkas, SDE/T on the .NET CLR team.

[via Keith Brown]

On the left, you see Lt. Uhura with her wireless Bluetooth headset (although I’m not sure of the made and model). On the right, you see me with mine (the Nextlink Bluespoon AX). I’ve waited all my life to be as cool as the folks on Star Trek and now it’s finally happened! I’m ready for my replicator, transporter, tricorder and Holodeck now…