Assemblies, Threads, and AppDomains

Abstract

Each of the applications developed during the first five chapters are along the lines of traditional “stand alone” applications, given that all programming logic was contained within a single (EXE) binary. One aspect of the .NET lifestyle is the notion of binary reuse. Like COM, .NET provides the ability to access types between binaries in a language-independent manner. However, the .NET platform provides far greater language integration than classic COM. For example, the .NET platform supports cross-language inheritance (imagine a Visual Basic.NET class deriving from a C# class). To understand how this is achieved requires a deeper understanding of assemblies.