Summary

The set of APIs described in this chapter allow the CLR to be customized to work in a variety of application environments. The extent of the customization allowed ranges from configuring basic startup parameters to controlling critical runtime notions such as how code is loaded into the process, how memory is managed, and when code is scheduled to run. The hosting API is factored into a set of managers that group logically related interfaces together. As the author of a CLR host, you get to choose which of these managers you'd like to implement so you can customize only those aspects of the CLR that are most important to your scenario.

This chapter provides an overview of the hosting API to give you an idea of the various ways the CLR can be customized. Throughout the rest of this book, we dig into different parts of the API in greater detail.