Programming in the .NET Environment

Application Domains

Application Domains Versus Processes

Chapter 4 briefly introduced the concept of an application domain. Traditionally, operating systems have allowed multiple processes to apparently execute simultaneously in memory.^[2] An operating system monitors each process and isolates the address space of each application, thereby preventing a process from accessing any other process's memory. If a process does attempt to access memory outside of its address space, then the operating system will terminate the erroneous process to safeguard the integrity of the other processes, including the operating system itself. This idea of process isolation is fundamental to any modern operating system. Unfortunately, processes often require a large ...