Challenges Using NT For Production Services 

Mark Verber

Draft 0.01 / October 8, 1999
Few updates May 10, 2007

The following is a list on things which have made building and deploying a production service on NT harder than it should be.  This list was generate in about 15 minutes ... in other words, it's shooting from the hip.

Development

Threads are hard, especially when debugging IIS.  We get something like 1gb of icepack logs from a 1 minute run.  The tools we know about make it really tough to comb through the output and find what we are looking for.  Insert a description of some of the instrumentation and tools which existed in the Cedar environment at PARC which made understanding thread traces and seeing deadlocks a bit easier.

APIs, Data Structures,  and Libraries

I hate most of Windows API.  I wish the interface police from DEC SRC (oops, HPlabs) would take a run at things and clean everything up.  Oh, but then we wouldn't be backwards compatible.  Sigh.

Debugging Pains

General Brokenness

Operations

 OS install

Registry

Software install

Logging

Management APIs

Remote Management

Plug and Pray