A colleague asked me today about building a multiple appdomain container. I recalled blogging about this sometime ago, but couldn’t find the posting hence here’s are a few thoughts on the subject.

The classic scenario is that you want to build a WPF application, but want to AppDomain isolation between components to ensure that one component doesn’t bring down the entire container (application). An example might be a container displaying market data, market news, analytics and research, plus of course the ability to trade. If market news crashes, you still want to continue trading.

Managed Add-in Framework (MAF – System.AddIn.dll) is probably the solution. The CLR Add-In blog has a posting “AppDomain Isolated WPF Add-Ins” which deals with this very issue. Daniel has a C9 video here on MAF. There are also a number of other postings that deal provide further examples here, here, here, here and here.

Samples are available on CodePlex here.

Finally, good old MSDN Magazine has two articles on .NET Application Extensibility – 1 and 2.

Sidebar: Building Dynamically Extensible Applications
AppDomains, Dynamic Code Generation, and Code Level Security