I've just returned from the 2.5 day Indigo ascend workshop in Munich. Next to getting an early insight on real-life Indigo it was also an excellent opportunity to spend some time with my fellow instructors; Dominick Baier and Marcus Heege. And if that wasn't enough on the 'fun' part of things, my friend Aaron Skonnard was presenting the days.

So, IndoGo or IndiStay?
Having been through the examples and labs (which i think are a little to eleborate for my taste), I've tried to come to my current consensus about Indigo.

Indigo is the implementation of what we expected WebServices to deliver a while back. Transport agnostic, Security, Reliability, Transactionality are the keywords in this topic. Not only how they are done 'beneath the hood', but especially the simplified programming model.

The Indigo experience, at this moment, seems to prefer early-binding approach. (which i personally believe is 'not the way to go'). It allows for 'easy implementation of distributed systems' by specifying the Service, Data and/or Message contracts. Although it fully allows you to take the 'late-binding' approach, it's not the focus of the Indigo programming model.

One remark I made is that again, the've made it to easy to 'go down the wrong path' and just annotate your current architecture with some WebService related attributes 'and you're done'. I'm not in favor of removing this possibility, but definitely to 'raise the bar'. This would fully allow people to use this functionality, but prevents the "wizzard->next->next->next->finish" approach.

One of the other issue I currently see is this "and bind them all" section. The binding of the contract to address is nicely split off, but not realy straight forward. Having the 'most common cases' available in your 'default' binding profiles does help, but also 'abstracts away' the important parts of this system. I.o.w. to make good use of this, you still have to know what the options are and which options are propagated by the defaults. (DomB, awaiting your post about 'default security in Indigo')

I can feel LOLA smiling at this abstraction... Seeying an opportunity to show up a lot ;)

So, I think "Indigo" is here to stay,
the question now becomes "when" will it come, and "for how long" will it stay..