Longhorn Pillars:  Indigo

Connected Systems – The Power of Indigo

Some of the elements Microsoft is toting to developers of Longhorn, is its:

• Managed code capabilities, which emphasizes safety, when writing applications.
• SOA Service Oriented Architecture, which are structured applications that are a composite of different services. 

Web Services, the heart of Indigo

Now we introduce Indigo, its web services element being built into the platform, allowing applications to use rich based Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) to be the conduit for applications to communicate with each other and not be a set of static objects. Indigo is a set of technologies for developing connected applications on Windows Longhorn. Indigo provides a complete and flexible messaging platform for building connected applications independent of network topology.

Indigo represents a new dimension in how we leverage the capabilities of a connected Internet through desperate systems taking web services to a whole new level. The “Connected Systems” concept of Indigo makes Web services the foundation for interoperability and integration. Indigo connected systems also demand guarantees for secure and reliable communication – requirements that are often costly and difficult to implement.

 Indigo will radically simplify how the next generation of connected systems is built. It accomplishes this through three architectural design goals:

 • Built-in support for a broad set of Web services protocols

• Implicit use of service-oriented development principles

• A single API for building connected systems

 Indigo gives developers less complexity by extending developers existing knowledge of the .NET Framework 2.0, and by enhancing and extending the fundamental richness of developer solutions such as Visual Studio 2005.

 Indigo offers a whole new level of excitement that will ignite a new set of applications expanding on top of the service oriented architecture infrastructure and exploit its capabilities in new ways. For the business and consumer markets, this is definitely a paradigm shift that offers greater level of sophistication when it comes to connecting up these applications with the web and building an infrastructure on top of the Internet.

Broad Support for Web Services

Today’s Web services technologies provide support for basic interoperability between applications running on different platforms. However, most of these technologies lack the ability to achieve this interoperability with guarantees for end-to-end security and reliable communication. Indigo delivers secure, reliable, transacted interoperability through built-in support for the WS-* specifications. For developers, this drastically reduces the amount of infrastructure code required to achieve heterogeneous interoperability. For businesses, it means the ability to interact with customers, partners, and suppliers both within and beyond the walls of the organization, regardless of the platform they use.

Service-Oriented Design

For years, developers and organizations have struggled to build software that adapts at the speed of business. Service-oriented development principles help overcome this challenge with architectural best practices for building highly adaptable software. Indigo is the first programming model built from the ground up to provide implicit service-oriented application development. This enables developers to build services that are autonomous and can versioned independently of one another, thereby reducing long term upgrade and maintenance costs. For businesses, this facilitates an IT infrastructure that is resilient to inevitable change and easier to manage over time.

Unified Programming Model

Traditionally, developers have had to use multiple technologies to build connected systems. This not only required them to learn disparate APIs, but also made it difficult to combine functionality from the different technologies into a single solution. Indigo provides the first unified API for developing all classes of connected systems. It combines and extends the functionality of existing Microsoft technologies (ASMX, .NET Remoting, .NET Enterprise Services, Web Services Enhancements, and System.Messaging) to deliver a single, highly productive development framework that improves developer productivity and reduces organizations’ time to market.

In conclusion, we can say that Indigo provides the functionality and flexibility to appeal to organizations of all sizes and developers from diverse backgrounds. It can be used to build connected systems that run within the context of a single machine, across company intranets, or spanning the global Internet. It addresses a broad spectrum of scenarios, from connected line of business and vertical applications to interactive multi-player games. In addition to extending the functionality of the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, Indigo can be used with BizTalk Server to provide both brokered and un-brokered application-to-application communication. And with support for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows codename Longhorn, Indigo will radically simplify how the next generation of connected systems is built on the Windows platform.

This feature information was obtained partially or in full from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft/longhorn and are provided by ActiveWin.com for your convenience. For the most accurate information please visit the official site. Microsoft retains all intellectual property rights.
 

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