Last Tuesday, we had our second master class of the LEAP : Lead Enterprise Architect Program.

LEAP is an initiative of Microsoft The Netherlands to bring together the lead developers / architects of various companies and let them discuss en get to know the Microsoft products that solve particular architectural challenges. I also attended the LEAP 2007, but was allowed to also attend this years edition again!
The purpose of LEAP is to increase the knowledge and insight of Microsoft products with experienced (but also upcoming) IT architects. This will be addressed within five master classes at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Barneveld (The Netherlands) and will be finalized with a 5-day visit to the Microsoft campus in Redmond WA (USA) where various speakers working on the campus will talk about still-to-be-defined subjects.

So the first Master class was 4 weeks ago and was titled: (De)Coupling of connected systems using Service Oriented Architecture.

After a first introduction by Serge van Schie (Developer & Platform Enthusiasm at Microsoft, and lead of this initiative), Andre Hoekzema (Enterprise Technology Architect at Microsoft) took the stage gave an interesting presentation with the following subjects:

• Layers of Service Oriented Architecture

• Standardize on Service Oriented Communication
• A common protocol : WS-*
• A common foundation : WCF
• Service Oriented Infrastructure
• SOAP is not enough: what about non-SOAP-connections, queuing, transformation, validation etc..  ESB –> BizTalk
• Business Process Management
• Workflow (System –BizTalk- and Human –WF- )
• Graphical tools for defining processes
• Integration technologies
• Business rule engines
• Business activity monitoring

Last week I attended the second session titled: Access to information and services in the back office : User Experience. Nico Copier (Enterprise Technology Architect at Microsoft) presented the following subjects:

• User Experience for Architects

• User Interface & Microsoft Technology

• Information Experience

Next master class : 21th of October!