The February issue explores the theme of "extensions" -- extending language support, extending tools, extending applications with new technologies...
In our lead article (Roll Your Own: Create a Language Compiler for the .NET Framework), Joel Pobar takes you on a tour of the inner workings of the CLR and demonstrates how you can build your own compiler.
Maria Blees presents WinUnit (WinUnit: Simplified Unit Testing for Native C++ Applications), a framework that extends unit testing to native C++ applications.
Silverlight is in the spotlight as well. Laurence Moroney demonstrates how to employ the Expression Encoder plug-in APIs by building and debugging a simple FTP upload plug-in (Silverlight: Create a Custom Expression Encoder Publishing Plug-In).
We also show you how to integrate the Policy Injection Application Block (PIAB) with WCF services and build state machines with Windows Workflow Foundation.
In the columns we take a look at using DLRConsole to explore Silverlight with dynamic languages and explore XML programming with Visual Basic 9.0. Dr. James McCaffrey demonstrates testing with the Microsoft UI Automation library and Stephen Toub builds a StreamPipeline class for parallel encoding and encrypting.