Application Development Using Visual Basic® and .NET

Application Isolation

When writing applications, it is often necessary to isolate parts of the applications so that a failure of one part does not cause a failure in another part of the application. In Windows, application isolation has been at the process level. In other words, if a process is stopped or crashes, other processes will be unaffected. One process cannot directly address memory in another process' address space.

For an application to use separate processes to achieve isolation is expensive. To switch from one process to another, the information must be saved and restored. This includes a thread and process switch. A thread switch requires saving call stack registers, such as the instruction pointer, and loading the information for ...