Certified Software Architect – Microsoft Platform is a Swedish Microsoft program for the training and certification of developers that want to become software architects. It specifically targets those that want to use modern approaches for the architectural design of applications and services for the Microsoft platform. The program is developed in Sweden and is jointly administrated by Microsoft and Microsoft's long-time architectural partners Sten and Per Sundblad at Sundblad & Sundblad.

The program's purpose is to help software architects, technical designers, business architects and senior developers use efficient principles and methods for the architectural design of business-driven and service-oriented software solutions.

Your safety – a Microsoft program

An early predecessor to the program was first launched in 2004 at the urgent request of Microsoft Sweden.

With the .NET Framework, Microsoft gained ground in enterprises. Increasingly, Microsoft realized that in larger enterprises, skillful programmers weren't enough to make good use of the .NET Framework. Architectural skills were needed too. To fill that gap, Microsoft wanted an architectural program for the new .NET world. That's why they asked Sundblad & Sundblad to develop such a program, promising the company to support it in every reasonable way.

Sundblad & Sundblad developed the program, naming it Certified .NET Architect. Microsoft labelled it as ”Endorsed by Microsoft”.

As it turned out, the Microsoft head office in Redmond had the same ideas as Microsoft Sweden about the need for an architectural training and certification program. They started to look around for such a program, and they found the Certified .NET Architect program. In 2005, they purchased a full license for free use of the program's curriculum.

Before purchasing it, they compared it to other architectural training programs that were available around the world. They told us, that the most important reason for selecting the Sundblad program was its uniquely strong slant towards ”Software-to-Business Alignment”.

The present version

In 2008, Sundblad & Sundblad launched a completely new program, the present Certified Software Architect Microsoft Platform program. The year after, Microsoft Sweden adopted the program as a Swedish Microsoft program. It's administrated jointly by Sundblad & Sundblad and Microsoft. The certificates are signed by representatives of both organizations.

The program's content is constantly changing, keeping up with new trends and technological opportunities that can positively affect solutions.

For example, Microsoft Azure now takes a lot more room in the program than it did from the start. New patterns that take advantage of the topic and subscriptions features in Microsoft's Service Bus have been added. There's now a model that extends agile development to include not only code-centric activities but also business-driven requirement enhancement and business-driven software architecture. The program now supports not only SOAP but also HTTP services with RESTful or RPC-based APIs, the Web API and quite a lot more that wasn't in the program from the start.

Software-to-Business Alignment, always a strong foundation for the program, is even stronger now than it used to be.

It's under constant development.