Customer Reviews

Customizing the Microsoft® .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (Pro Developer)

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Having started in 1999, by the year 2002 I already felt old with the CLR/.NET. The exciting discovery phases were over by then. The dozen starting people of the DM CLR list had morphed intro thousands. Consequently, the year 2002, IMHO, saw the publication of the CLR/.NET books that defined the landscape and nothing really since then has really said anything that hadn't been said by then. 2002 saw the defining books of .NET such as Jeff Richter's Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming (I still insist it is the 1st book every .NET developer should read), Don's Essential .NET, The Shared Source CLI Essentials, and for the tortured souls stuck doing Interop, Adam's masterpiece, .NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide. There were great books covering all of the areas of .NET. I had written most of my .NET info pages in 2001 and 2002. There was very little left to say and I felt that very little spoke to me after 2002. Phil Stanhope and I contemplated writing a book called "Non-Trivial .NET" because there was nothing coming out that was deep. Today, I got real excited like 2002 again as I stumbled across Steven Pratschner's Customizing the Microsoft .NET Framework Common Language Runtime. CLR wonks drool over this: A Tour of the CLR Hosting API, Controlling CLR Startup and Shutdown, Using the Default CLR Host, Using Application Domains Effectively, Configuring Application Domains, Loading Assemblies in Extensible Applications, Customizing How Assemblies Are Loaded, Domain-Neutral Assemblies, Extending the CLR Security System, Writing Highly Available Microsoft .NET Framework Applications, Enforcing Application-Specific Programming Model Constraints, Managing How the CLR Uses Memory, Integrating the CLR with Custom Schedulers and Thread Pools. In other words, the real stuff, the nitty gritty. This happens to be the kind of issues I now face with the CLR: hosting the CLR in "strange" containers and dealing with CLR shutdown and startup. Steve is in a unique position, having been on the original CLR team and now a PM for the .NET CF. If you want to go beyond VS.NET and do custom things with the CLR, this is the book for you. For example, the chapter Loading Assemblies in Extensible Applications is worth the price of admission alone. This is the kind of stuff that we do in our job and there is nothing out there about this. Highly Recommended!

Amazon Reader,

There are few books that significantly add to our understanding of .NET. I can count on one hand the truly outstanding books and this is one of them. Don't let the C++ throw you if you are not a C++ developer. This is simply the deepest, most well written book on a subject that has had far too little exposure. The CLR (especially with 2.0) offers so many options for customization and optimization. If you do not know what an AppDomain is, this is not the book for you. But if you are at or near the top of the .NET food chain (and I am not saying I am) I would highly recommend this book.

I learned so much information that would of taken me days if not weeks to try and piece together and I am sure there is some information that is only available here. WELL DONE!

Kind Regards,
Damon Carr

This book does provide a great deal of valuable information for any .NET developer and is definitely a book worth reading. However, since the topic is a bit advance, it would certainly help if the example application used to illustrate extensible application architecture was more complete. The proposed example application 'Boat Race' started in chapter 5 provided a great beginning, but left the reader hanging even after reading chapter 6. The downloaded companion samples did not include any code sample for 'Boat Race', which was the main example used to explain the concept.

After reading the positive reviews on this book, I hoped this book would tell me things MSDN did not. How wrong I was. There is more information on MSDN than can be found in this book. For example, in Chapter 1, the author lists the function ExecuteInDomain, referring to Chapter 7 for details. In Chapter 7, the ExecuteInDomain function is not even mentioned. Also, the author often leaves out crucial details that would allow you to actually understand the point he is trying to make.

The topics covered by this book are so specialized that the vast majority of .Net programmers will have no need for this level of detail on these topics. However, if your application does require expertise on any of the topics covered in this book (I needed information on AppDomains), this book is excellent. It is very detailed, clearly presented and authoritative.

If you want to understand the intracies of how the 2.0 build of the CLR has been designed and implemented to support the hosting of it this book is it. I am a very curious person, I love technology and even more I love to understand how it works...

When I wanted a better understanding of how SQL Server Hosted the CLR than what BOL could give me I began searching. I was referred to this book by Microsoft Program Manager(s) (as in plural) and sure enough the book filled my void. If you are an expert Microsoft developer/architect this book had better be on your bookshelf.

The book gives a good insight in the workings of the CLR as an unmanaged process.
Require more full working code samples as against the code snippets.

Brilliant - along with essential .net Volume 1 - the best .net books I've read to date.

Highly reccommended.

A key part of the .NET environment is the Collom Language Runtime (CLR). At the initial level, this is a fairly simple thing to use.

At a higher level, CLR gets more complex. In this book one of the program managers on the .NET Compact Framework team at Microsoft where he worked on several CLR features.

This is not a beginners book. You need to have some knowledge of the .NET framework and some idea of the kinds of things you'd like to use CLR to do. If not, you will find this book pretty difficult reading. If, on the other hand, you need to use CLR, this is the definitive book.