(October 27, 2003) – As I walked out of the opening keynote (run by Bill Gates and Jim Allchin) at PDC 2003 Monday, it occurred to me that it was one of the best keynotes I have seen in years. Trust me, I have been to 10+ years of these things. I am usually disappointed by opening keynotes, and I believe Bill Gates is as sick of his “Digital Decade” speech as I am. But he had all-new content for the PDC, and Longhorn in its infant stage, simply put, looks awesome. I have been playing with the Longhorn bits, but I have not seen compelling demos done against the bits until now, and I was duly impressed. Longhorn, the next major release of Windows, will be the biggest release since Windows 95, according to Gates. That is quite a bold statement because, in my opinion, Windows XP was a pretty huge leap. But, my mission here is to tell you about Indigo. Let me explain Indigo first with the team’s mission statement. The internal mission statement for the Microsoft Indigo team at Microsoft is: “Make .NET the essential platform for building and deploying distributed applications.” The word “distributed” is the key here. In simple terms, Indigo promises to fulfill the decade-long answer to the “truly distributed computing” problem. A year or so back, we thought that Web services was the answer, but it turns out Web services alone doesn’t include enough of the plumbing – and requires too much infrastructure – to accomplish a common playing field for distributed applications. Yesterday, I got a chance to talk to David Treadwell, general manager, of the .NET Developer Platform team. David told me, “Indigo is designed for building and running connected systems. It represents our progress in Web services and in making the development of connected systems simpler for the developer. I’m sure that PDC attendees will be excited by the capabilities that Indigo provides.” And man, was he right! The capabilities of Indigo really get you thinking about the future of distributed applications. Can you imagine writing a small amount of managed code to create a SOAP message in memory and then securely sending it to its destination with guaranteed delivery?! Oh, and here’s the best part: this little .NET app does not use IIS! Indigo provides the transport infrastructure and leverages all that’s good in Web Service Extensions (WSE). My only negative on all this is that we won’t see it for a while, and the pain of waiting for this to ship is going to be excruciating. In Longhorn, the developer platform advances encompass four major components:

• Avalon: Codename for the presentation layer
• winFS: Codename for unified storage
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• Fundamental: Codename for base OS services
• Indigo: Codename for communications

Sitting in the opening keynote of PDC 2003, it was clearly evident that Indigo – as the key component of enterprise and distributed computing – has the boldest mission of the key components of the Longhorn strategy. In the grand scheme of the Longhorn strategy, Indigo’s mission is the toughest to accomplish, but when it succeeds it will allow us, the software developers and system architects, to reap great rewards.