Never a dull moment in Redmond, WA. At 5:30 I pulled out of my garage to scoop up Lauren and head home. And hit bumper to bumper traffic right outside my building (for the first time in 5 years). About 10 minutes (and about 1000 feet) later, Lauren informed me that there was a robbery at a nearby bank. First time the FBI has laid foot on Overlake plaza I bet!
Releasing the Indigo Preview has involved a mix of excitement and angst. It’s great to be able to talk publicly about a product I’ve toiled so long on. Yet I’m most curious (and I’ll admit, a little nervous) to hear what parts of Indigo users really like and, just as important, those areas where we’ve fallen short.
Fortunately we have 2 great areas for you to provide feedback:
Ladybug (more formally known as the “MSDN Product Feedback Center”) is available for reporting bugs, making suggestions, and tracking feedback. Bugs filed here make it back to us in development so that we can fix them! Remember to choose “Indigo” in the Product/Technology dropdown when you enter your issue. So take a spin, and please let us know what you think. Operators (or at least developers, PMs, and testers playing the role of operators) really are standing by.
Lauren and I spent yesterday afternoon in front of the X-box. But instead of kicking alien butt in Halo 2, we were the ones getting our butts kicked by Maya, the innocent looking personal trainer of Yourself Fitness. The game will utilize whatever props you have around the house (hand weights, step, exercise balls, etc), and target a 45-60 minute workout for cardio, flexibility, upper, or lower body workout. Yesterday we did the upper body workout with hand weights. In 45 minutes I was more worn down than from my normal 90 minute gym run. Maya provides inspiration (“work your cardio!”), but is also relentless (“I want you to feel muscle fatigue with this one”, “do it right!”). She never needs more than 10 seconds of rest, so why should you? While I was skeptical at first, I must say that it’s a killer workout, and awfully convenient to fit into your schedule.
In related news, it seems Dance Dance Revolution has gotten recent press on its health benefits, and is even being used in child weight studies. While I can see DDR working your cardio, after experiencing nonstop sets of lunges, squats, and curls, I’d put my money on Maya in a head-to-head jelly your muscles competition.
A couple of things attracted me to the Indigo team 3+ years ago. First was getting to work on a fully multi-threaded, asynchronous distributed platform, and the technical challenges inherent in such a project. The second was helping design interoperable WS-* protocols and work with other vendors to get our platforms to interoperate. But most important was the story behind the fly codename, which goes like this:
In the beginning there was a Web Services project at Microsoft started under the codename “Green”. Then on a sunny day in the fall of 2000, inspiration struck. Two of the founding members of Green (Robert Wahbe and John Shewchuk) were driving on 101 south of Mountain View and passed the following billboard:
Robert and John knew they had found a winner. They returned to Redmond with the new codename proposal and it has stuck to this day.
If you want to help me, Don Box, Brad Lovering, Martin Gudgin, Steve Maine, Mike Vernal, Doug Purdy, and others ship Indigo, we currently have about 20 jobs available in development, test, and program management.
If you’re not familiar with the “ABCs of Indigo” (Address, Binding, and Contract), please click here for background on some basic Indigo terminology and concepts.
When users first start playing with Indigo, there are two common approaches to the system: those that want to trace a message exchange from the “top” (by building a Service), and those that want to start at the “bottom” (by tracing the Message as it enters the system and makes its way up to the typed ServiceMethod). Those in the latter camp generally start by hunting for transports, which put your messages on the proverbial wire.
A few notes about transports in Indigo:
While Indigo at its core is “transport agnostic” there are of course implications to choosing each transport. Up next, I’ll discuss what some of these implications are in a home networking scenario.
Some amusement courtesy of Lauren:
Before I joined Indigo in 2001, I worked on Office for the Macintosh. So it was really easy to describe my job to my Mom. Explaining what I do as the tech lead for Transports and Channels takes a little more time. For while she’s familiar with Word and Outlook, if I mentioned Named Pipes and TCP I might as well be speaking in Klingon. So here it goes:
Indigo is a communication platform, that developers use to write computer programs that exchange information with other programs (on the same machine, across the internet, etc). Programs send Messages to each other over Channels. I’m responsible for making sure these Channels get the Messages from A to B .
For my Mom, I tell her that Bill thinks it’s important and we stop there. For this blog, we can now begin.
I’m back on the internet with a mission to reclaim my good name in google (right now the top match for “Kenny Wolf” is a machinery auction from ’01).
The last time I had my own website was in college, back in the days before CSS and WordPress. Back then I thought that personal “home pages” were a passing fad, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. With some fabulous tools support, blogging is all the rage (Mom, it’s short for “web log”, the new form of online personal diaries).
So here I am. I expect to post a lot about Indigo, the Xml Web Services platform I’m working on at Microsoft. We had a customer event last week, and as you might expect there were a bunch of questions that weren’t addressed by the documentation. And now that we’ve made an early version of Indigo publicly available, I can start doing my part to help our customers.
