What Makes This .NET Framework Book Unique? | Customizing the Microsoft .NET Framework Common Language Runtime

Numerous books have been written about the .NET Framework and the CLR since their introduction in early 2002. This book is different in that it is targeted at those developers who want to dig deeper into the subject of .NET Framework programming and expand their overall knowledge of how the CLR works. Most of the topics I cover in this book aren't found in introductory books about the .NET Framework. Instead, I cover those advanced and unfamiliar topics that will help you (once you are familiar with them) write more flexible, reliable, and secure applications.

A few years ago, I worked on a CLR subteam responsible for integrating the CLR into products like SQL Server and Windows. During that time, I realized that many of the features the CLR team was building to support these application models make the CLR much more flexible and customizable in a way that enables developers outside of Microsoft to integrate the CLR into their own applications as well. To that end, many of the topics I cover in this book are of direct use to those developers hoping to integrate the CLR into their existing products, to write applications that are extensible, or to customize the way the CLR works by default. The following list gives you a flavor of the topics I cover, many of which are new to .NET Framework 2.0:

Using the CLR hosting APIs to customize the CLR from unmanaged code
Configuring the CLR startup parameters, including version and build type
Using application domains to isolate effectively groups of assemblies running in a process
Configuring application domains to best meet your specific requirements
Managing multiple application domains easily by writing an application domain manager
Understanding strategies for dynamically loading assemblies into your application domains
Diagnosing assembly loading failures
Loading assemblies from custom file formats and locations
Specifying your own assembly version policy
Using domain-neutral assemblies to reduce the amount of memory consumed by applications that use several application domains
Customizing the Code Access Security (CAS) system to restrict the permissions granted to the code running in your process
Using a new feature named host protection to enforce programming model constraints that are specific to your application
Controlling the way the CLR behaves in the face of exceptional conditions, such as out of memory errors and stack overflows, to protect the integrity of your process
Configuring the CLR's garbage collector
Replacing the primitives the CLR uses to allocate memory to track memory usage or restrict the amount of memory the CLR can use
Integrating the CLR into an environment that relies on Win32 fibers or any other mechanism that requires cooperative task scheduling

Even if CLR integration or extensibility isn't your current goal, a deeper understanding of .NET Framework programming will help make the applications you're writing today better. For example, learning about the subtleties that can occur when multiple versions of the .NET Framework are installed on the same machine can help you design your application so that it is not affected when a new version of the .NET Framework gets deployed; knowing how application domains are used for isolation can help you build applications that are more reliable and secure. Also, if you happen to be a developer who writes components for use within other applications, this book can help you understand how the applications that use your components are likely to be designed. This knowledge can help you write add-ins that more seamlessly integrate with the applications that host them.