Appendix C. Hosting the Common Language Runtime
In This Appendix
The CLR ships with several different hosts. These hosts have taken the CLR and customized its environment so that it is better suited for the application:
ASP.NET—This host is initialized by an ISAPI filter that starts the CLR and makes sure all of the Web traffic is properly routed to the correct process.
Internet Explorer—IE needs to recognize a special MIME type so that it can execute managed code controls from HTML pages.
Shell Executables—When a process containing managed code starts, a small piece of unmanaged code bootstraps the managed code and runs it.
Sometimes you might want to customize the startup and initialization of the CLR for a given process. You might have certain security settings that are required for every process. Your application might require special options for managing multiple users or processes. You might want to build your own custom host for various reasons. This appendix provides you with an overview of the process of getting a custom host for the CLR up and running.