Learning Windows Server 2003

Management Tools

In this section, I’ll look at both GUI and CLI management tools that you can use to administer the .NET Framework and your web applications with Windows Server 2003.

GUI Tools

The GUI tools included with the .NET Framework are fairly limited, but worth a mention. They consist of two tools, the .NET Framework Configuration MMC and the .NET Framework Wizards.

The .NET Framework Configuration MMC

This tool is apparently the greatest Microsoft has to offer in terms of graphical management of the .NET Framework. This is unfortunate, as this tool could use a lot of additions to the management of settings within XML configuration files.

You can find the tool in the Administrative Tools panel in Windows. Figure 9-9 shows a snapshot of the tool.

Figure 9-9. The .NET Framework Configuration MMC

I’ll quickly cover the first level of the tree to give you a basic understanding of the tool:

• Assembly Cache is another view of the GAC Explorer extension that you also can find at %SystemRoot%\assembly in Windows Explorer, but without the drag-and-drop Add functionality. You can remove assemblies with it.

• Configured Assemblies is a summary of the assembly location and redirection settings from the machine.config XML configuration file. This provides a method to redirect references to an assembly on a machine basis.

• Remoting Services provides a very limited interface for manipulating the ...