Erik Christensen is a Distinguished Engineer working as a developer/architect on new distributed technologies in Microsoft’s Connected System Division.

Christensen joined Microsoft in 1994, working in the Visual Basic group. After playing a key role on Visual Basic 4, 5, and 6, he moved to the newly formed .NET Framework team to work on the problem of “Sending XML around the Internet”. There, he led a team that developed ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX) and XML Serialization (a way of mapping XML to objects). In the process he worked with IBM and others within Microsoft to produce the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), which was published to the W3C standards organization in 2001.

Christensen then moved to the “Indigo” team and worked for nearly six years on a general purpose communication platform that was later named Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). He contributed to almost every part of WCF including various Web Services specifications such as WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, and the .NET Message Framing and .NET Binary XML protocols.

While working at Microsoft, Christensen has received over 35 patents.

Christensen was born in Kolding, Denmark, but grew up in the Seattle area. After graduating from the University of Washington in 1988, Christensen worked for three years on a cross-platform GUI framework at Microrim (a small database company). He then moved on to work at Aldus for three years on application frameworks, peer-to-peer workflow technologies, and the PageMaker desktop publishing application.