SharePoint 2010 Service Applications

David Taylor from Microsoft has a very good series on how to build Service Applications for SharePoint 2010 in his blog. When trying to get a better overview about this topic, the other good option is to look at the code Microsoft ships with reflector. Besides some stuff (for example the Claims based authentication model with WIF) the new architecture is quite straightforward. I have been mostly looking at Word Automation Services … unfortunately as it looks, there are next to none extensibility hooks. And the implementation which ships is quite bare-metal …