Back from PDC, mailbox dealt with, finally some time to post...

As David observes, for many of us last week was a wonderful whirlwind of Indigo and Don, blended together from Monday through Thursday. Here are some thoughts...

Like everyone I know, I'm in love with Indigo. The reason is simple: the layered API hits the sweet spot. It used to be that building distributed apps meant writing sockets code. Then along came RPC and object RPC systems that encapsulated grungy details behind a programming model. Hiding the details was good, the programming model was okay - except when it wasn't. Unfortunately, with those frameworks, you didn't have much choice. Indigo, in contrast, layers functionality so that hiding the grungy communication details doesn't mandate a particular high-level programming model. You get security, reliability, transactions, etc., whether you choose to deal directly with XML messages, map message bodies to object models, use simple request/response message exchange patterns or something more complex, or whatever. In short, you can build communication models the way you want without having to go back to sockets and do everything yourself. That is exactly where I want to be.

Don's talk introducing SOA on Monday afternoon was the best one I've seen him give in a long time. I've learned a lot about being a speaker from Don and it was great to see him deliver that performance.

Finally, I had the pleasure of spending time with Steve Lucco, who works on Indigo with Don. Steve joined my wife Sarah as a lead vocalist in Band on the Runtime. He's really really smart and a great guy to hang out with. (Also, Steve's rendition of CPU Bound gets my vote for most hummable BotR tune, it's been stuck in my head for days.)