Customizing the Microsoft® .NET Framework Common Language Runtime

Chapter 9. Domain-Neutral Assemblies

In Chapter 5, I discuss how application domains act as subprocesses by providing an isolation boundary around a logical application running in an operating system process. To guarantee this isolation, the CLR must make sure that all assemblies are scoped to a particular application domain. That is, all assemblies are loaded within the context of an application domain, and, once loaded, an assembly is not visible to code running in a different application domain. However, I’ve shown that applications that create multiple application domains often end up loading many of the same assemblies into each domain. For example, it’s often the case that many of the Microsoft .NET Framework libraries are loaded into every ...