Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET

Learning from the Past

History is a fabulous teacher to those who are willing to learn from it. The history of the Windows operating system is filled with important lessons about what works and what doesn't work with respect to deploying and maintaining application code. Fortunately, the architects of the .NET Framework took many of these lessons to heart and used them in the design of the CLR.

History has taught us that the Windows Registry is often a source of problems. When an application relies on settings in the Windows Registry, it increases the complexity and the cost of that application's deployment and maintenance. This is especially true when production machines are being managed from across the network. Depending on what kind of network ...