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Dear visitor,

I am Christian Weyer and you are looking at my profile page. Together with Ingo Rammer I am one of thinktecture's co-founders.
As you may already know by now, we are a European company aiding and supporting software architects and developers in designing and implementing .NET software with focus on distributed solutions architectures.
But what about me? What is so special with that guy Christian Weyer? Let me talk a bit about me and my profession.

Knowledge & Experience Transfer

Quite likely you are looking for thorough experience when it comes to designing your software. You may plan to build a never-seen distributed solution, specially suited for your aims, or simply need advice as how to approach the world of non-local applications. These applications may be just for your internal and in-house use or may be exposed to the big wild world. Whichever goal you may have, there is definitely the need to get things modelled and designed in the right way - the way you need it.
But distributed applications are different. They are not just constituted out of a plethora of objects with a long wire, no. Software architects and develoeprs these days need to rethink if they have never build non-local software before. And they also need to rethink to accommodate today's needs. I had to learn it myself on a long and dirty road. There are a lot of non-functional aspects to consider, being security, performance, scalability, evolvability, manageability, interoperability just some prominent ones. Learning all of this can be extremely long-winded, time consuming and... well, expensive.

My primary task and passion is to help you in getting jump-started on the design and architecture as well as on the implementation of distributed solutions built on the Windows and .NET platform. Throughout the past ten years I have aided customers to successfully get a basement for their software, for their distributed software. What I learnt in that time is that there are three important stakes in the ground of distributed applications:

• Thorough, evolvable design
• Robust architecture
• Deep technology knowledge

Around these three cornerstones there are surely a lot of problems and issues to solve. It is my daily work to provide solutions.

Know Your Stuff

Although it is nice to talk about design and architecture, in the end you really need to know the stuff you are intending to build your applications with. I work with .NET Framework (since 1.0 Alpha and now extensively with 3.0), Visual Studio, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and ASMX every day. Of course, I am also proficient with the other technologies for building distributed solutions (like Sockets, Named Pipes, Remoting, MSMQ, COM+/Enterprise Services), but WCF and WF are surely the path to go in the future for almost all scenarios I am faced these days.
Together with Ingo Rammer I am a member of the worldwide elected Indigo Digerati team, a circle of some hand-selected external experts who gives feedback on WCF, WF and related technologies directly to the team in Redmond.

As a real-world evidence, one very common reaction in the German-speaking area is this: "Web Services? WCF? Well, Christian Weyer!". This puts confidence in the way I work as well as shows new customers that they deal with the right person and company.

Proven Practices

Since 1996 I have been modelling and implementing distributed applications with Java, COM, DCOM, COM+, Web Services and other technologies. Recently I have been focusing on the ideas and concepts of service-orientation and their practical translation in customer projects. To be successful - which means to bring success to a customer - I have the strong opinion that we need views on architecture and distributed solutions which are both mature and innovating. Something we at thinktecture always try to act out.

When doing projects jointly with customers we build prototypes that apply a number of project- and situation-specific best practices. Practices are not durable on paper or Powerpoint slides, only in code.

Developer Productivity

Every solution architect should know how to write software, should know how to code. This is even more true when it comes to estimating the effort developers may face when having to implement certain designs and architectural blueprints. I have written some libraries and tools to easen the life of a software developer.

DynWsLib is a library for invoking Web Services dynamically without having to generate a client-side proxy class at design/compile time with tools like wsdl.exe or Visual Studio. It has been very successful in the past years and is now superseded by a community-initiated project called ProxyFactory.

By far more prominent is the WSCF tool. WSCF stands for Web Services Contract-First and depicts both a way of thinking and modelling as well as providing tool support to actually make this thinking realizable inside of .NET 's platform. WSCF promotes a schema-based contract-first modelling approach for (Web) Services in .NET and inside Visual Studio and has been adopted by small to medium to very big companies all over the world.

Human 'Interoperability'

Windows is not alone, .NET is not alone, we are not alone.
Being able to let heterogeneous systems talk to each other is both challenging and satisfying for me. But not only on the technical level we need interoperability, also between human beings, between developers, between architects.
Therefore one of my aims each year is to communicate with the national and international developer and architect community through my weblog, webcasts, forums activities, INETA usergroup talks and conference performances. As a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Connected Systems and as an independent Microsoft Regional Director (RD) I love to share all my ideas with the community and am happy to discuss and help wherever I can..

What is in it for you?

Let me help you so that you can help yourself building those distributed solutions on the Windows and .NET platform that you need. Get in touch with me at christian.weyer@thinktecture.com. Feel free to visit our Services page to get some more ideas of how thinktecture could be of any help for you and your team. We live to serve.

Thanks,
Christian Weyer