You have a bug! And you must implement the [PatHelland] attribute!

One of the things I've learned quickly on our team is that the customer is everything. That's not a marketing phrase but the literal truth. Up until January 31st I had great personal powers to cause 11th hour changes in WCF and since the day I joined up that power is gradually diminishing. That's not only because we're edging closer to RTM, but also because it's more difficult to fill in the "business justification" column for design changes that I would want to propose. There is a tension between "more and better features" and "shipping" and of course also a huge difference between a customer legitimately saying "I don't like that behavior" and "umm, so how do we make Rocky happy?".

It turns out that you (yes, you) have two very easy ways to make your suggestions heard and quite directly contribute to our product planning and to file bugs on things that don't work, things that you consider to be behaving in a strange way or stuff you plainly don't like or consider to be missing.

So if you think that we should have a [PatHelland] attribute that constrains the behavior of a WCF service to the exact guidance along the lines of Pat's Fiefdoms and Emissaries or Metropolis models we'd love to hear about it. (Even though the reply to that exact feature request would probably be an explanation of how to build that on top of the WCF extensbility model - you can actually build that attribute today ;-)

1. The MSDN Forum. The forum is the place where all Program Managers on our team listen. We get a daily report of unanswered questions and we have an internal website where we can manage and assign the questions. So your questions do in fact land in our inboxes.

2. The MSDN Product Feedback Center. You can file bugs straight into our internal product database (called "Product Studio"). That tool is the most powerful way for anyone to submit bugs and feature requests. Whatever goes into the feedback center is an actual, unresolved product bug until it's been on the table and has been given serious consideration. We currently only have a tiny little number of bugs from the product feedback center in the database and we are of the humble opinion that we can't be that good ;-)

Filing bugs and suggesting features is always welcome. You shouldn't be worrying that we have a cutoff point for features at some point before RTM. That's our thing to do. There is always a next version and planning for that has actually started.