Ron Jacobs

 is an Architect Evangelist in Microsoft's Architecture Strategy Team team based in Redmond, Washington. After a long career as a developer, program manager for various Microsoft products and product manager for Patterns & Practices.

Ron became host of the Channel9 show ARCast.

A popular conference speaker Ron brings together solid architectural content and a sense of humor together to help you succeed in building architecturally sound and secure applications.

Too many people think an architect is just a really advanced developer but is that what makes a good architect?

In this session we will consider the role of the architect in software development and the exact nature of the work that an architect does by answering three important questions:

• What is the role of an architect?
• What is software architecture?
• And do I want to become an architect?