What is Indigo in SOA World

Indigo combines support for Web services with transformation, intelligent routing and message-oriented middleware capabilities such as guaranteed delivery and publish-and-subscribe. Gartner classifies this type of middleware as an enterprise service bus (ESB).

Like other ESBs, Indigo has a distributed design and supports multiple protocols, communication patterns, network topologies and encoding formats such as XML. However, unlike other ESBs, Indigo is built into the operating system.

Indigo updates the Web services support and some other communication functions in the .NET framework. Indigo will include advanced Web services features, including security, transactions and management. Indigo will supersede all of Microsoft’s communication middleware, including COM, COM+, .NET remoting and Microsoft Message Queue Server, but will provide some backward compatibility to reduce coexistence and migration problems.

difference between workflow applications and Business Process Management (BPM)

What is the difference between workflow applications and Business Process Management (BPM) applications? To me, BPM just looks like workflow services with a 'managerial decision-making capabilities' plug-in. Am I right in assuming so?

There is some grey area between workflow and BPM. Workflow is a somewhat more technical description (orchestration is a very technical term that tends to be used in this context also). BPM is more of a category focused on Business Processes. Thus you could even say that Workflow is one way to implement Business Processes, and that BPM is about the management of workflow. So you are right in suggesting that BPM is like workflow with a manager interface -- it is literally the management of business processes, which can be in some cases manifested as workflow.

Two Stages of SOA

SOA Starts with Design and Delivery
In chronological order, there are two stages to SOA.

The first stage is called design and delivery. As the title suggests, design and delivery is about building, governing and deploying services and applications.

The second stage is called Run-time which consists of technologies such as registries, application servers and governance.

Build
Build is the first step in the design and delivery phase of SOA. Build describes the ability to create new services as well as custom and composite applications. Build is the most important step in the entire SOA lifecycle. It is the platform from which all other steps and phases are created. How a company builds services is critical to the success of SOA and maybe the company.

Govern
Traditional development and assembly models lack the ability to have business owners request services, govern the creation and reuse, and manage service dependencies.

Deploy
The final step in design and delivery is Deploy. In a nutshell, this means that after building and governing the creation of services and applications, companies must deploy the services and applications to application servers. This is easier said then done. The deploy step is complicated by multiple types of servers, multiple environments and even the server clusters. The key to any good SOA implementation is the support for any type of deployment option.

Windows XP Media Center Edition

Media centre won't be any better for you if all you want is an operating system for a typical PC workstation.

MCE is intended to be used as a home entertainment computer. It looks exactly like a normal XP install until you run the Media Centre.
The Media Centre operates as a media player for vid files and DVDs, has a photo viewer (which automatically pans accross the images to make the viewing more interesting), and will play mp3 playlists etc...

MCE really shines though when you get a hardware encoding TV Tuner card (and remote control) and pipe the video output to a television. Your computer then becomes a very good personal video recorder (you will never use a VCR again). It automatically downloads your program listings and lets you record by point and click in a variety of quality levels. MCE starts buffering a channel as soon as you flip to it. This will let you pause live TV and rewind to any point in the buffer. I've used lots of TV tuner apps (beyondTV SageTV ChrisTV) MCE blows them all away for ease of use.

MCE 2005 is a great OS but you will want some special hardware to go along with it. MCE compatible Video card with TV out (min Gfx 5200) MCE compat. TV Tuner card (hauppaugge, ATI theatre 550 Pro - All-in-wonder cards are NOT compat) Wireless mouse and KB MCE Remote control (hauppauge remote works ok but requires special config. Mouse actually will work well enough but remote is much nicer) Quiet CPU and Case fan to reduce noise.