Processes, AppDomains, Contexts, and CLR Hosts

Summary

The point of this chapter was to examine exactly how a .NET executable image is hosted by the .NET platform. As you have seen, the long-standing notion of aWin32 process has been altered under the hood to accommodate the needs of the CLR. A single process (which can be programmatically manipulated via the System.Diagnostics.Process type) is now composed of multiple application domains, which represent isolated and independent boundaries within a process. As you have seen, a single process can host multiple application domains, each of which is capable of hosting and executing any number of related assemblies.

Furthermore, a single application domain can contain any number of contextual boundaries. Using this additional level of type isolation, the CLR can ensure that special-need objects are handled correctly. The chapter concluded by examining the details regarding how the CLR is hosted by the Win32 OS.