I just finished reading, Dave Chappell's article on Indigo. Man, I can't wait until we have access to the CTP! If I were to pull three main points from the article, I will say the following:

  1. Indigo surely emcompases all 'distributed' computing technologies under an easy to use bundle (see Nick's post).
  2. Indigo pushes developers to think of services as components of their applications rather than something mystical and external to their application.
  3. Indigo makes you wonder if your current (serviced|distributed)-architecture can withstand a smooth migration.

The most interesting section of the article was titled Coexistence and Migration. Dave outlines how each of the current technologies, (Web Services (ASMX), .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services), will migrate to Indigo. As he states, Before Indigo is available, the best technology choice for distributed .NET applications that don't need queuing is probably ASMX. It's simple to use, and it also provides the smoothest migration path to Indigo. ... .NET Remoting, however, should be used primarily for communication between two application domains in the same process. ASMX is a better choice for direct application-to-application communication in most other cases. Hopefully, this statement makes .NET Architect's to think carefully when designing their next 'distributed' application, because the decisions made today could affect how much code you fix tomorrow./bloghelper>