Longhorn lowdown: What's up?

Here comes Indigo
The really exciting stuff, and the pillar that is much closer to being finished, is Indigo. Indigo is the code name for Microsoft's new communications platform, which combines Web services, Remoting, COM+, MSMQ, and peer-to-peer communication into one unified framework. If you've heard the latest catchphrase "service-oriented architecture", that's what Indigo hopes to enable. Just to jog your memory, SOA is an architectural paradigm in which programs are designed as a series of interconnected, discoverable services that work together.

So why bring everything under one roof? Because right now, it takes an ungodly amount of code to build a secure, transacted pipeline using today's tools. It's insane, and I personally wouldn't touch WSE with a 10-foot pole. It's just too much code to learn for the kinds of tasks that I generally need to accomplish. Thankfully, help is on the way.

At PDC 2003, Chris Anderson and Don Box showed a 500+ line WSE-enhanced secure, transacted message pipe, and accomplished the same task with no more than 15 lines of code on Indigo. It shouldn't take a genius to connect these dots: communication is about to get a whole lot easier.

Microsoft's plan for Indigo from the beginning has been for Indigo to be available for all current (WinXP/2003) and future Windows platforms. They haven't set any specific launch dates yet, but this writer is going to predict that you'll see Indigo released as part of, or slightly after, the "Yukon" wave (which consists of .NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server 2005). Those products are currently slated to ship in June 2005, so be on the lookout for it.

Bringing it all together
Longhorn's priorities have changed. It happens in every software development project, and it was going to happen here. Building software is about finding a balance between three critical issues: resources, features and schedules. The first part of the project is about a term my chief executive calls "dreamstorming" or coming up with all the things you'd like the program to be able to do if the world were a perfect place. Not long after that though, the team has to get its head out of the clouds, and its feet firmly planted in the reality of ship schedules and shareholders.

Microsoft changed some of its Longhorn strategy in order to make the technology available to a wider audience, and still ship in a reasonable time frame. Developers can rightly mourn the loss of WinFS from the initial release, but there are plenty of other reasons to be excited, even more so now that there is a "downlevel" story. Ultimately, they made the best decision possible.

I have to end with the "o-blog-itory" shameless plug. Over on LonghornBlogs.com, Interscape's award-winning home of all things Longhorn, I've been discussing the ramifications of Microsoft's changes in great detail. The series is called "The Longhorn Shake-up", and I've already put out two parts of the four-part series. Part one discusses the social perspective and the events leading up to the decision, while part two explains the lessons learned in Microsoft's "software wave" strategy.

Robert McLaws is President of Interscape Technologies, a .Netsolutions firm in Mesa, Arizona. He's also a Microsoft ASP.Net Most Valuable Professional (MVP). He can be contacted through his Weblog.