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.

Support for WS-* specifications and compatibility with existing Microsoft distributed application technologies form the basis of Indigo's interoperability. Indigo can communicate using Web services protocols to speak to any platform that supports Web services, said Ari Bixhorn, Lead Product Manager of Microsoft's Web Services Strategy. Bixhorn demonstrated a patient-tracking solution for a hospital, in which data from monitoring devices would be pumped into an Indigo service and sent out to multiple clients. He then added a Web service for patient prescription data that ran on BEA WebLogic, graphically illustrating how you can use Indigo to interoperate seamlessly with non-Indigo services.