Thanks, eldoen. 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 platforms, Indigo implements SOAP and other Web services technologies, allowing developers to create reliable, secure, and transactional services that can interoperate with software running on any system.

Indigo is built on and extends the .NET Framework 2.0, which is scheduled for release in 2005. Indigo itself will ship as part of the Windows release code-named Longhorn, scheduled for 2006, and it will also be made available on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This description is based on a pre-release version of Indigo's first Community Technology Preview. Be aware that some changes are likely (almost certain, in fact) before the final version ships.