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inTHiNK! it’s official!
After 5 great years of fun at Microsoft UK it’s time for me to say so long as I move on to new things although I fully expect to remain part of the Microsoft ecosystem and still haunt the corridors of the UK Campus from time to time!
So what does a Microsoft Architect do after Microsoft? Well more architecture it seems from the business through to its people and the systems the use. There are actually three main strands to my post-Microsoft strategy that I’ll summarise below:
As you may know I’ve had a long history with IASA, especially here in the UK where I founded and have chaired the UK chapter for around 6 years now. During this time we’ve been developing a credible and sustainable education and certification program for IT architects and now, along with my colleagues at IASA, I want to bring this to Europe. We’re holding our next UK certification boards this November but the plans for IASA Europe are much bigger than just this.
inTHiNK! is the name of my new professional services practice www.inthink.co.uk. inTHiNK! will offer services from business & technology strategy, architecture practice and guidance through to cloud readiness and enablement. This will scale out through an extensive associate network of solid top-level IT professionals. Contact info@inthink.co.uk if you want to follow up.
As a brand new bizspark partner I will be seeking to exploit the value of the Azure platform delivering a new breed of SaaS enablers and business offerings to the market!
Here’s my new contact details if you wish to stay in touch
Matt Deacon
CEO, inTHiNK! Ltd
www.inthink.co.uk
mattdeacon.wordpress.com
www.twitter.com/mattdeacon
Visual Studio Architect Guidance
I got chance to organise an analyst briefing last week at Microsoft to cover the architecture capabilities of Visual Studio 2010. It was a great session as there’s such a strong and exciting story growing for Microsoft in their support not just for architects but right across the Application lifecycle that also reaches out to support development not just of .NET but other languages too which is a great example of Microsoft taking interoperability seriously.
There’s plenty I could talk about, such as UML support and more significant, that you can reverse engineer the likes of sequence diagram directly from your code. Or the architectural explorer and the support for creating layer diagrams with rules that you can then validate your code against plus the support for dependency matrices, and so the list goes on.
However, this raised a slight concern for me that with the growth in tools like these could eventually lead to a significant overhead in learning how to use them. Obviously they are built to be intuitive and easy to use but all the same, the shear volume could become overwhelming.
But as luck would have it the meeting coincided with the release of a codeplex project that provides guidance on how to get the best out of Microsoft’s Architect Tooling in Visual Studio. This has been produced by a set of Microsoft Rangers who have the job it provide out of band solutions for missing features or guidance on the product so you know it’s always going to be useful and based on real-world experiences.
Finally, as this guidance had input from Alan Wills, who has long been synonymous with the world of software modelling, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s worth downloading an evaluation copy of VS2010 Ultimate and having a trail if you haven’t already upgraded!
Architect Tooling:
vsarchitectureguide.codeplex.com/
Visual Studio Ultimate:
www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/ultimate
Time for a change …
Or new begining!
Having blogged first on Microsoft’s TechNet blog and then MSDN I thought it would be fun to go independent and see if I can attract an audience above the automatic search engines and web trawlers!
So if you’re into the IT architect space maybe give this blog a whirl!
don’t believe me then take a look at my previous blogs at
Matt Deacon's All New Digestive Blog 