Tom Fuller left a great
comment on my last post. Mostly, it reminded me that I ought to be just as explicit about what's great about Indigo as I am about what's not so great. To answer Tom's specific question, the point of all this negativity is to influence the design of Indigo before it's released. The Indigo team has a tremendous opportunity to improve the quality of an entire generation of distributed applications by providing a solid infrastructure for application architects working on the Microsoft platform. I want to do my part to help them succeed. I think they're missing the boat by not providing a more straightforward, Mort-accessible messaging interface. Without further ado, here's what's great about Indigo.
- The people behind the technology. The Indigo team, as a group, is the most talented, passionate, and driven collection of geeks I've ever seen. [side note to my British readers: That sentence is grammatically correct in American English even if your way (team are) makes more sense.] Their willingness to engage the community (even grumpy old curmudgeons like me) is impressive.
- The core technology for distributed programming is truly a thing of beauty. Deep down under the covers, Indigo has a well-designed engine. This gives me hope that the more cosmetic problems can be fixed.
- The message layer programming model. Yes, I realize this is also on the list of things I hate about Indigo, but you can't have a simpler messaging model without a quality lower-level programming interface. I'm very happy that the Indigo team built this layer on top of the core technology.
- The extensibility model. Even though I never plan to use it, I'm glad they did such a good job because it means the Einsteins of the world can extend Indigo for my benefit. If you're a Mort, this is vitally important.
- [MessageContract]. This attribute is the closest Indigo comes to providing a simple message-oriented approach. Even though it's way too limited, the fact that it is there at all gives me hope.
The fact that this list is shorter than the first shouldn't be taken to mean that there's more bad than good in Indigo. These five things are vastly more significant than the 10 things I hate. Besides, I stretched the first list to get in an indirect reference to "The Taming of the Shrew". Next up, I'll take up Steve's challenge to be more specific in a slightly different way and try my hand at designing the simplified messaging interface I'd like to see from Indigo. It may take awhile. Designing API's is very tough and this blog is something I do on my own time.
Posted
Aug 15 2005, 08:19 AM
by
john-cavnar-johnson