MicrosoftTo Deliver New System For OnlineFinance

REDMOND, Wash. - (02/09/05) -- Microsoft is promising significantproductivity gains and security with a new communicationsinfrastructure for web-based financial transactions. The Indigocommunication system is designed to drastically reduce code fordevelopers building reliable Web services and is scheduled for abeta release in June, with general availability in 2006.Functioning with the Visual Studio 2005 development platform andlanguages such as C# or J#, Indigo saves developers from having towrite thousands of lines code, leveraging metadata, according toMicrosoft. Indigo is built as extensions to the .Net Framework,with support planned for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and theproposed Longhorn version of Windows. Indigo will back theMicrosoft-driven WS-* architectures for Web servicesstandardization. WS-* is how Microsoft refers to the set of Webservices specifications that features Web Services ReliableMessaging, among others.