Last week in San Francisco I had dinner with my good ol’ Microsoft MVP solutions architecture buddy Beth Massi and her significant other, Alan Griver. We had a great time weaving our way through the crowds at the St. Patrick's Day block party on Front Street but we could not get close enough to the bar to get a beer and ended up at the nearby Gordon Biersch's for dinner.
During the conversation over dinner Beth gave about the best definition of software architecture I've heard - I'm not sure I have the wording exactly right, but it was basically that software architecture is all about figuring out how to put together things that were never designed to work together in the first place.
Meaning things like J2EE and .NET were not designed to work together but since they are often used in the same companies, someone has to figure it out.