Programming in the .NET Environment

Application Domains

Application domains have previously been described as subprocesses within a process. Processes are the unit of fault tolerance within an operating system. If one process behaves erroneously, such as by trying to access the memory of another process's address space, then the operating system will terminate the erroneous process but leave all other processes unaffected. However, processes are often expensive in terms of resource usage, because the operating system must continually monitor processes. By comparison, a number of application domains can exist with a single process, yet require no extra overhead from the operating system. Instead, the execution system manages the application domains. Compared with using multiple ...