What is Indigo?
Choosing the best abstractions for building software is an ongoing process. Objects are the dominant approach today for building an application’s business logic, but modeling application-to-application communication using objects hasn’t been as successful. A better approach is to explicitly model interactions between discrete chunks of software as services. Plenty of support already exists for building object-oriented applications, but thinking of services as a fundamental software building block is a more recent idea. Because of this, technologies explicitly designed to create service-oriented applications haven’t been widely available. Microsoft’s framework for building service-oriented applications, code-named Indigo, changes this. Indigo allows developers who today create object-oriented applications using the .NET Framework to also build service-oriented applications in a familiar way. And to let those applications interact effectively with software running on Windows and on other
Indigo is a rich blue dye that was widely used throughout the ancient world, from Indonesia to Europe. The distinctive dark blue color of indigo has made this dye famous, with a variety of synthetics being used today to produce indigo which is colorfast and fade-resistant, in contrast with the indigo of natural origins used historically. Many craft stores sell indigo in their dye sections, for people who want to work with this dye directly. The earliest records of indigo date to around 1600 BCE, and seem to suggest that the use of this dye probably originated in India, spreading out to the Middle East and China and diffusing from there. In fact, the word “indigo” comes from the Latin indicum, which means “of India.” Indigo quickly became a very popular color thanks to its depth and saturation, which made wool, cotton, and linen garments incredibly dark. This dye was historically sourced from plants in the genus Indigofera, a member of the pea family native to Asia. Indigo could also be
Millet says “Our next generation platform for doing Web services and messaging infrastructure.” Then Steve spends the next 43 minutes taking you through what Indigo was designed for, and gives you a demo of how it could be used in your own applications. More information on Indigo is available on the Indigo Developer Center on MSDN. There’s also an introduction to Indigo over on MSDN TV (given by Indigo architect Steven Swartz). Sorry for the shaky camera, we handheld this one. Scoble left his tripod at home. Naughty naughty. If you just want to see the demo, fast forward to 32:33.
