This week is Strategic Architect Forum IV where we are bring over 200 top strategic architects from around the world to Redmond for a series of presentations and breakout discussions. Norman Judah, CTO of MSFT Services, is doing the opening keynote. Other keynote speakers include Pat Helland, Software Factories’ authors Keith Short and Jack Greenfield, plus a Q&A session with BillG. Last year, we recorded all the sessions and published them as The Architecture Strategy Series. We’re still working out the specifics for this year’s content, but we will be publishing this year’s sessions as soon as we can.

One of the things that’s interesting about SAF is that we do a small number of traditional presentation sessions and a large number of discussion breakouts. For these discussion breakouts, we get around fifteen to twenty architects in a room to discuss a problem. For example, I’m doing a talk discussion breakout tomorrow on Refactoring Your Best Practices. Each breakout also has a moderator and a note taker – the goal being to record the knowledge and to track a list of action items.

In addition to SAF, we have two ancillary events going on. All of our field architect evangelists are in town with their customers, so the past two days we had training for them. I had to speak Sunday morning about our influential and community programs. We also have most of our Architecture Advisory Board in town for SAF and their twice-yearly face-to-face meeting. This is the first face-to-face meeting of MAAB since I took over the program, so I’m looking forward to meeting these folks in person.

Last night’s IASA meeting went very well. I always take it as a good sign when community get-togethers end because building security kicks you out 45 minutes after you were supposed to be done. About 25 people showed up and were treated to food, free materials and factories. Steven did a good job presenting Software Factories, and he was even nice enough to let me chime in on a regular basis with my $0.02. BTW, the next meeting is on Oct 27th (last Wed of the month) and I’m going to miss it because of OOPSLA. Watch the IASA website for more details.

One of the key questions asked was if MS was going to “break tradition” with factories and embrace open systems. I guess we still have a long way to go to change that perception, even though we standardized CLI & C# and continue to be a major driver of the ongoing web services standardization effort. Regardless of perception, I agreed – I think it’s important to enable Software Factories to be embraced by the industry at large. The Architecture Strategy team has several members who are heavily involved in standards bodies, and they had similar feedback. Of course, we have nothing to embrace beyond the book so far, but we have hinted at tooling to come. As promised, I sent last nights feedback to Keith, Jack and the other folks involved and I hope we’ll see that incorporated into their long term plans.

I asked the hard-core folks who stayed late last night what they thought was the best approach for MS to take for getting Software Factories embraced by the industry. Obviously, any tooling around Software Factories would be built on a set of specifications. We could standardize these specifications as we have for CLI, C# and web services. Alternatively, we could simply publish the specifications with an open and royalty-free license (similar to the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas). Given recent comments by Grady Booch and Simon Johnston (both from IBM) disparaging domain-specific languages and software factories, I’m not sure how well a standardization process around DSLs would proceed. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much industry buy-in there would be for specifications that weren’t collaboratively developed. Leave your opinion, and I’ll make sure it gets to Jack, Keith, et. al. just like the feedback from last night did.