I've been blog-lite while I prepared and then gave my Indigo presentation to the London .NET User Group. The audience seemed to enjoy it and I had a good time presenting it. Some quick points:
- The selling point of the Indigo Service model is that it is simple and easy to use. The benefits for developers is that they get all the benefits of enterprise-quality features such as transactions, reliable messaging and security without having to write any code. Letting Microsoft do the plumbing allows developers more time to write code that focuses on solving complex and interesting business problems.
- I took on board Clemens' experience and started talking about the 'why' of distributed technologies before delving into how Indigo works. Luckily this group was very switched on. I got some good questions about the performance of Indigo across AppDomains/Processes/Machines.
- Someone asked me to provide some background on why Enterprise Services are a better choice than Remoting for communicating between components on the local machine. Clemens' has some more information on it here and here.
Doing a presentation where you don't have the current version of the software to demo is a challenge (the PDC Indigo bits are from an older, M4 build, which has been substantially refactored in the now-being-coded M5 build, so there's not a lot of value in showing demos with the PDC bit). In order to get some code samples I had to transcribe screen shots from the PDC videos (difficult since Steve Swartz didn't use word-wrap in Visual Studio). I'm filled with (even more) respect for Don Box and Steve Swartz's presentation skills after realizing they managed to do four Indigo presentations at the PDC without even compiling, let alone running any of the applications.
Given the PowerPoint dependence and Clemens' reports on the complexity of the topic I decide I'd have to resort to audience bribery. I drew on my experience in TheatreSports and brought several bags of Minties from the Australia Shop at Covent Garden (to my horror I discovered today that they are made in New Zealand!) and threw them to the audience whenever I detected the signs of PowerPoint-induced lethargy.