Chapter 10. Hosting Managed Code

By Rudi Martin

IN THIS CHAPTER

• What Does Hosting Mean?

• Containing Assemblies Through the Use of Appdomains

• Controlling Trust Within the Hosted Environment

• Dealing with Assembly-Sharing Issues

• Using Appdomains to Secure Unmanaged Clients

Up to now, we have looked at security from the point of view of a standalone application or a control or component loaded from within another application. This chapter re-examines security from the viewpoint of a hosting application. That is, an entity that loads, executes, and controls other software components—possibly those with a trust level below that of itself.

This chapter has the following goals:

• Familiarize the reader with the concept of hosting.

• Introduce the most powerful tool the .NET Framework provides to implement a host—the appdomain.

• Describe different techniques for controlling the trust level of code loaded into a hosting environment.

• Outline the use of appdomains to secure code that runs outside the scope of the .NET Framework but manipulates managed objects.