Indigo

Well, I had considerable difficulty getting a demo up and running with Indigo because I wasnt reading the documentation carefully. You think that you dont have time to do that and you end up wasting more time in the end. Also, ther isnt a lot of troubleshooting help on the Internet in general on Indigo. The best place to look at is the newsgroups. I'll subscribe to those shortly.
I think that Indigo has a lot of promise. I am impressed by the simplified programming model and the support for security which is very easy to incorporate. There are some great MSDN TV episodes on this, so check out the ones especially by Doug Purdy and Steve Schwartz. I encourage you to try it out. Here is how.
Make sure that you do not have .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 installed. There are removal instructions for that on this website.
Download and install Avalon and Indigo Beta 1 RC. You will download winfxsetup.exe which is about 2 MB. It will then download and install .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 which is about 21 MB, followed by 13 MB worth of Avalon and Indigo Beta 1 RC. Having done that, install Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. To order that free, go to the beta experience website. After that, download and install WinFX SDK.
Having done that, you can now play with Indigo. I'll blog later about stuff to do to start learning, as I do it myself. Stay tuned!