Indigo to Power Servers

Microsoft’s upcoming platform for advanced Web services, code-named Indigo, received a boost at a Jan. 2005 developer conference when Senior Vice President Eric Rudder announced it would be incorporated into future Microsoft server products, including BizTalk Server and SQL Server. However, Indigo hasn’t even reached its first beta release and could still undergo significant change. In addition, some well-regarded experts worry that the Web service specifications on which Indigo is based were standardized without having been used in production settings.

What Is Indigo?

Indigo will provide the capabilities developers require to exploit advanced Web services or build them on Windows. For example, although Active Server Pages .NET (ASP.NET) already provides the basic features of sending and receiving XML messages over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Indigo will provide the ability to enforce message security and ensure that messages are sent reliably over unreliable transport protocols.