BANGALORE: The world's largest software maker is planning to launch a certified course exclusively for the software architects within the next six to nine months, according to Gurpreet S Pall, Senior Director, Architecture Strategy for Microsoft Corporation. "We are in the process of evaluating and creating an architectural course ware for the growing community, which is growing by about 2-5 percent." The software application giant offers a number of certified courses for the large pool of software developers across the world.

Addressing the third annual software architect conference in India, Pall was bullish about the software architect's role becoming more and more formalized and well defined, while the contribution to the overall business strategy invaluable.

The other effort taken by the company are, formalizing and materializing the thoughts of the software architect, which has been posted by the 75,000 unique visitors of the Microsoft Architect Website. There are also 500 dedicated software architect experts in Microsoft assisting partners and customers.

The Redmond, Washington based Microsoft Corporation will be releasing the successor of Visual Studio.Net, Visual Studio 2005 Team Systems, sometime in the middle of next year. The unique feature of this product for the developer, is built with a lot of tools for the software architect.

A book for the software architect was also launched during the conference, titled- Software Factories, written by a couple of experts from Microsoft Corporation.

Longhorn, the much-anticipated update to Windows, is featured with 'Indigo'-a service oriented architecture feature, targeted at the software architects. Such is the thrust from Microsoft for professionals willing to align themselves in the thought process of the business while designing the solution.