I have been hard at work getting ready for the public beta of my first micro ISV product Snip-It Pro, a great snippet manager that helps you organize and make the best use of all your code snippets (It should be ready by the end of the month so sign up to be notified here). But I wanted to take a break from it to tell you all some great news. I just received my advanced copies of the February edition of MSDN Magazine which include an article titled "PIAB and WCF - Integrating the Policy Injection Application Block with WCF Services." I co-authored this article with an Avanade colleague of mine, Hugh Ang. You can read his blog here.
I actually came up with the idea for the article over the summer after spending some time looking at the Policy Injection Application Block (PIAB). I had previously helped co-author an article for the Microsoft Architecture Journal about how aspect oriented programming compliments soa. I liked the policy and attribute based approach to aspects using the PIAB, but thought it wouldn't play well with Service frameworks like WCF since you needed to instantiate PIAB objects using a factory.
I was originally thinking about some sort of code generation approach to integrating the two, but after talking with Hugh about it, he was pretty sure we could integrate the with WCF behaviors. He whipped up some code and had a working prototype using a Contract Behavior attribute. I took it a bit further and figured out how to drive it through configuration using a custom end point behavior.
Anyway we collaborated on the article together and it has just been published. I am very happy as getting an article in msdn was a goal that I can happily say I met.
Next goal is to launch a successful micro ISV. Wish me luck!