The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 5 (of 5) - Any good books about supporting .Net

Any good books about supporting .Net

I'm now in the enviable position of having to support .Net on our production servers, even though we know so little about it. Not a nice simple installation: 1.0 and 1.1 side-by-side on NT.

What I could do with is a good, comprehensive guide for the system administrator regarding .Net.

I know that there are lots of books about learning C# or VB.Net, but I don't see much about trouble shooting assemblies and stuff like that.

Where do the assemblies go? What configuration files are used? What are the dependancies? You know the type of thing I need to know.

Any recommendations?

Ged Byrne
Thursday, July 15, 2004

Oreilly's Dot Net Frameworks looks like a good start.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/dotnetfrmess3/toc.html

Anybody recommend this?

Ged Byrne
Thursday, July 15, 2004

I don't know of any great books but you can find up to date info by reading the MSDN blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/

They are a great source of information and you can (potentially) ask the MS employee who works on whatever product or feature is giving you trouble.

Newsgroups are a good source of info too.

Kentasy
Thursday, July 15, 2004

The best one that I've seen covering this area is Applied .Net Framework Programming by Jeffrey Richter, but thats:
a) Getting old
b) Not really what you asked for (and there MUST be something better) it's more of here's whats going on under the covers book for programmers
c) It does cover all of the config file stuff and encryption really well.

As far as dependency goes there is a lot that can be done via reflection. There are some .Net dependency walkers around which google will find for you.

Peter Ibbotson
Thursday, July 15, 2004

Peter,

I've been scavaging the office and a copy of Applied... has turned up. It looks like Section 1 and 2 will do for a start. I don't need all the stuff about types, though.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Ged Byrne
Thursday, July 15, 2004

Good. I just didn't want you spending money on it, when I'm sure there MUST be something a bit more like the normal "Administrating an XYZ server" that might be a tad more suitable.
With Whidbey it's all change again :)

Peter Ibbotson
Thursday, July 15, 2004

Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471180416/104-7084371-2400730?v=glance

Yukon
Thursday, July 15, 2004

For at least ASP.NET, I quite like this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735619360/qid=1089920567/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/102-3281980-9072925

It doesn't answer all your above questions, unfortunately, but at least it tells you what all that web.config and machine.config stuff is, as it pertains to ASP.NET.

Chris Tavares
Thursday, July 15, 2004