C Sharp —

Security

The most important facet of any distributed application development environment is how it handles security. Thankfully for those of us who have long complained that Microsoft would never be taken seriously in the server-side enterprise solutions space without a completely new approach to security, .NET brings many concepts to the table. In fact, security begins as soon as a class is loaded by the CLR because the class loader is a part of the .NET security scheme. For example, when a class is loaded in the .NET runtime, security-related factors such as accessibility rules and self-consistency requirements are verified. In addition, security checks ensure that a piece of code has the proper credentials to access certain resources. Security code ensures role determination and identity information. These security checks even span process and machine boundaries to ensure that sensitive data is not compromised in distributed computing environments.

Deployment

Deployment is, by far, the most gruesome task associated with developing extremely large distributed systems. In fact, as any Windows developer can tell you, dealing with the different binary files, Registry issues, COM components, and support library installation of products such as open database connectivity (ODBC) and Data Access Objects (DAO) is enough to make you rethink your career choice. Thankfully, deployment is an area where the .NET design team obviously spent a lot of time.

The key to .NET application deployment is the concept of assemblies. Assemblies are simply packages of semantically related behavior that are built as either single-file or multiple-file entities. The specifics of how you deploy yourapplication will vary based on whether you're developing a Web server application or a traditional desktop application for Windows. However, with the introduction of the assembly as a fully encapsulated set of functionality, deployment can be as simple as copying the necessary assemblies to a target location.

Many of the problems that caused so much trouble for programmers prior to the .NET Framework have now been eliminated. For example, there's no need to register components-as you do with COM components and Microsoft ActiveX controls-because with metadata and reflection, all components are self-describing. The .NET run time also keeps track of the files, and the versions of the files, associated with an application. Therefore, any application that is installed is automatically associated with the files that are part of its assembly. If a setup application attempts to overwrite a file needed by another application, the .NET runtime is smart enough to allow the setup application to install the needed file, but the CLR doesn't delete the previous version of the file because it's still required by the first application.