Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Understanding Application Domains

An application domain is a unit of isolation for executing managed code. For a better understanding, let’s make a comparison with the Win32 world. In Win32 you have processes. Each process is isolated from other processes by the system so that a process cannot interfere with other processes and with resources required by such processes. This prevents process corruption and unexpected crashes. In .NET Framework architecture the idea of isolation is provided by application domains, so an application domain is the place where an assembly runs isolated from other assemblies; when an application is started, the CLR creates one application domain for it. Although a Win32 process can host multiple application domains, ...