Customizing the Microsoft® .NET Framework Common Language Runtime

Chapter 5. Using Application Domains Effectively

If you’re writing an extensible application or have reason to unload code without shutting down an entire process, you’ll likely want to take advantage of application domains. Application domains enable you to isolate groups of assemblies from others running in the same process. Oftentimes, the isolation provided by application domains is used to run multiple applications in the same Win32 process as is done by CLR hosts such as Microsoft ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server. However, application domains are useful in a variety of other scenarios as well. For example, some applications use application domains to isolate individual controls running in the same process, whereas others use domains simply ...