Application Domain - Properties

Properties

A CLI application domain is contained within an operating system process. A process may contain many application domains. Application domains have isolation properties similar to that of operating system processes:

• Multiple threads can exist within a single application domain.
• An application within a domain can be stopped without affecting the state of another domain in the same process.
• A fault or exception in one domain does not affect an application in another domain or crash the entire process that hosts the domains.
• Configuration information is part of a domain's scope, not the scope of the process.
• Each domain can be assigned different security access levels.
• Code in one domain cannot directly access code in another.

In this sense, a CLI is like a mini-operating system. It runs a single process that contains a number of sub-processes, or application domains.

The advantage of application domains is that running multiple application domains may require fewer resources, such as memory, than running multiple operating system processes. It should be noted that communication between domains still requires marshalling, so the overheads can be closer to using multiple processes than to communicating within a single domain.