Mohsen Agsen is a Technical Fellow working in the Developer Division. Agsen joined Microsoft in 1990. He was one of the key people who established Microsoft’s service and consulting business on the West Coast. His work with large customers ultimately led him to Redmond where he helped turn Microsoft into a credible enterprise software supplier. He worked on advanced enterprise development tools in 1993 which ultimately led to the formation of the database and query visual design tools teams, the initial investment in team development, and the acquisition of SourceSafe.

In 1994 Agsen turned his attention to database and transaction processing, where he helped recruit and hire top database talent. He formed the core transaction group, which designed and delivered the Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) and shipped it as a core component of SQL Server 6.5. In addition to contribution to the overall design, he developed the DTC user interface and performance counters and integrated it with SQL Server, coordinating with (now another technical fellow) David Campbell. After DTC, Agsen led the team that designed and developed the Microsoft Transaction Server. MTS was a ground-breaking product release for Microsoft and the industry, and ushered the era of transition from old transaction-processing monitors to modern application servers. In addition to his management responsibilities, he contributed hands-on code to core components of MTS, such as the context wrapper, administration, performance monitoring and clustering. MTS was integrated into IIS, forming the Microsoft Active Server.

In 1997 Agsen led a task force to determine the component strategy for Microsoft. Working jointly with a group of senior architects, the group developed a proposal for COM+ as the next-generation component investment. COM+ was adopted as a project and ultimately (after a number of critical changes) led to the formation of the Common Language Runtime (CLR). Agsen continued working on COM server technologies, such as load balancing, and was one of the creators of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) which became the standard for structured HTTP communications.

Agsen worked on other projects such as Microsoft’s bCentral small business online portal, and managed the team that delivered Microsoft Finance Manager before the acquisition of Great Plains Software.

Agsen is passionate about technology in general and mobile technology in particular. When not coding or designing, he can be found playing video games, looking for new phones to buy or evaluate, or prototyping.