Microsoft on Tuesday offered new details about how the next version of the Windows operating system will use Web services to connect systems over the Internet and to make programmers more efficient. As an example, Microsoft senior VP Eric Rudder said that generating a secure, reliable Web service capable of interacting with other systems on the Internet will go from a programming job that requires 56,200 lines of code to one that requires three.

Rudder discussed what Microsoft calls the Indigo programming model, a version of which is due to be released in March in advance of Microsoft's next version of Windows, dubbed Longhorn. Indigo is a collection of guidelines and defined way of doing tasks meant to simplify the job of including security, reliability, and messaging into an application that will be accessed via the Internet as a Web service.

Indigo, an extension of the .Net Framework 2.0, is Microsoft's latest push toward services-oriented architecture and should give Microsoft a stronger response to the SOA approaches offered by competitors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems. "The shift toward SOA is an inexorable one," Rudder said in an interview after his speech at Fawcett Technical Publications VSLive conference. "We want to do all we can to make the developer more productive."

Microsoft is also promising that Indigo will make it easier for Web-services applications to communicate with each other, regardless of whether they're running on Windows. Rudder illustrated a new Indigo service tapping a BEA Systems Inc. Java WebLogic application server running on Unix as an example. "It's a little like the old saying of, 'On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.' The developer just sees a Web service. He doesn't know if it's on a server running Unix or Windows," said Rudder, senior VP for tools and servers.

Indigo won't produce new tools or technologies for developers to learn. Instead, it will extend support for a set of standards, such as WS-Security and WS-Discovery, into existing Microsoft's Visual Studio tools and BizTalk Server used to pass XML messaging. The WS standards were drawn up by Microsoft and other industry vendors, including BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and Sun, as the means for generating Web services, Rudder said.

Developers using Visual Studio, which includes the Visual Basic and C# languages, have five diverse programming models to choose from, such as Active Server Pages.Net, Web Services Enterprise, or .Net Remoting. All are part of what's known as the Microsoft .Net Framework. Indigo is the extension of .Net Framework 2.0 to include a set of application programming interfaces and support for new standards that will make it easier to create Web services. In effect, a Visual Studio developer identifies "security" as an attribute to add to an application, then tells the tool where it should be placed. The tool then binds, or embeds, the "attribute" into the application.

The task is changed from one requiring hundreds of lines of Visual Basic, Visual C++, or C# to one that consists of identifying an attribute from a library and noting in a configuration file where it's supposed to be placed.

Initially the task of adding security to a Web service took 20,379 lines of code; adding reliable messaging took 5,988 lines of code and adding transactions took 25,507 lines of code, Rudder said. With an additional 4,442 for infrastructure plumbing, the total came to more than 56,000. Now security, reliable messaging, and transactions each require one line of code, he said.

In addition to improving interoperability with Web services based on other vendors' software, Indigo also expands the number of underlying connectors and adapters available to developers through BizTalk Server and Microsoft MQ messaging system. "The value proposition is connectivity," Rudder said.

The result will be "lots of different ways to view data" instead of relying on an exchange of information that fits into an HTML form or preformatted page. Web-services users will be able to tap needed information from a wider variety of devices and receive more customized reports and information through Indigo services, Rudder predicted. Instead of HTLM text on what the boss said, a salesperson might get an audio message that illustrates the tone, along with supporting text and charts that help get the message across, he noted.

A version of Indigo should be ready in a matter of weeks. With a nod to the fuzzy nature of software-development deadlines, Rudder told about 2,000 developers at the conference that Indigo will be available for early adopters in March, "even if that means March 38."