Victor Stodell

Well, there is not very much to say about the trip to Redmond, except that it was awesome! It has been a week filled with seminars and social activities in Microsoft Conference Center and closeby venues. We even paid a visit to The Flight Museum outside Seattle and actually got a private tour from Clemens Vasters, who knew surprisingly much about airplanes. Not only have I been able to meet other extremely talented developers and architects who participated in the LEAP program, I've also had the chance to meet some of the most involved people at Microsoft and got to hear about the latest and hottest topics in IT today. The speakers included Jonathan de Halleux , Stuart Kwan, Scott Guthrie , Miha Kralj , Clemens Vasters ,  Cihan Biyikoglu ,  Bryan Agnetta and more. The topics were everything from theoretical architectural lectures to deep product previews and technical discussions. Overall it was a great schedule packed with so much information I almost don't know wha...

I am back home in the couch filled with enthusiasm from the last gathering of LEAP Sweden before the trip to Redmond in the end of May. Todays topic was the new versions of Windows (server and client) as well as the Business Intelligence product suite from Microsoft. The Business Intelligence suite basically is a really nice integration between products that already exist. With SQL Server 2012 , SharePoint 2010 and Excel 2010 tightly integrated Microsoft offers a really attractive package. Mikael Nyström showed off some of the new features in Windows Server 2012 . To say the least this is an impressive release. There is a heavy focus on virtualization, storage and terminal services which makes Microsoft a strong competitor against both VMWare and Citrix in the small to medium sized business segment. One of the coolest features has to be conditional permissions. Johan Lindfors gave a demo on Windows 8 development . He showed some samples of how easy it is to develop Met...

Today was the third day of the Swedish Lead Enterprise Architect Program at Microsoft in Kista. It has been a day filled with sessions on security and identity with a kind of unavoidable focus on federated identities in the cloud. Overall it has been an awesome day with seminars from Henrik Nilsson , Barry O'Reilly and Sergio Molero among others. A lot of Microsoft technologies was mentioned, Forefront Identity Manager , Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 , Forefront Unified Access Gateway , Direct Access ,  Windows Identity Framework and of course  Azure Access Control Service . Microsoft really has a great suite of applications regarding Identity & Access Management. I just wish there was a project or two where I could utilize all of these amazing technologies. I have had a plan to add a login feature to the Cornball using federated identities, so that might happen in the near future. Besides, Björn Eriksen provided a tip for all of us thursty for e...

I am back home in the couch after the second day on the first gathering of Microsoft LEAP Sweden 2012 . It has been two days packed with lectures on architecture and cloud computing. Without giving away too much, here are some short notes from this first gathering: In software arcitecture, knowing your patterns and practices is always a good thing. The same goes for best practices. SOLID is not a new concept, but it bears repeating! The future is all about bring-you-own-device , the cloud in general and  Azure  in particular. Also, the future is now! The Windows Azure HPC Scheduler is awesome for high performance computing scenarios where an extra boost is needed. You gotta love the elastic cloud! I will start working on a Rock Paper Azure bot this weekend and try to conquer the world. The speakers that shared this information with us were among others Patrik Löwendahl ,  Brian Prince  and of course  Björn Eriksen  that is organizi...

I have been privileged to participate in the  Lead Enterprise Architect Program  at Microsoft this spring. The Lead Enterprise Architect Program (LEAP) is a program that aims to give understanding of the strategic core components of the Microsoft platform. LEAP consists of five master class training sessions as well as three days of sessions at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Seattle. The direction of the classes are extremely appealing and I really hope that they will live up to my expectations: Application architecture on the Microsoft Platform Cloud computing for Architects Identity & Access Management Integration on premises and in the cloud Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search The program starts in February and ends with the trip to Redmond in the end of May. During this time I will try to write as much as possible about this whole experience, which I hope will be amazing!