Summary

This book describes the many ways the CLR can be customized to satisfy the unique requirements of your application. Throughout this book, these customizations are described within the context of CLR hosts and other extensible applications. A CLR host is an application that uses the CLR hosting APIs to customize the CLR. Examples of CLR hosts include SQL Server 2005, Internet Explorer, and ASP.NET.

Now that I've defined some basic terms and discussed the typical architecture of an extensible application, let's get started with a broad overview of what you can achieve by customizing the CLR using the hosting APIs.