It seems like most people are unaware of the Indigo samples that shipped with the Longhorn SDK and that are available online here. There are over 40 samples covering basic services and clients, security, transactions, reliable messaging, hosting in ASP.NET, and advanced extensibility. There's one uber sample that's actually all of the other Indigo samples combined (for convenience). All samples can be built using msbuild.exe from the command line. Check them out and let me know if you have any feedback or questions.