NGWS SDK Documentation  

This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.
To comment on this topic, please send us email at ngwssdk@microsoft.com. Thanks!

Overview of Runtime Hosting Interfaces

This specification describes the classes and interfaces provided by the NGWS runtime that hosting environments use to launch the runtime, create Application Domains and execute code in assemblies. Examples of hosting environments include IE running web pages that contain managed code and/or script, ASP+ running web applications, and VBA running Office macros.

In each of these cases, the hosting environments need to run managed code on behalf of the user and take advantage of the application isolation features provided by the runtime. For details on the runtime's support for application isolation see: http://comrtime/Specs/admin/AppDomains.doc.

The NGWS runtime provides a set of unmanaged interfaces we call the hosting interfaces that hosts use to configure and start the Runtime. Once the Runtime has been started and the initial app domain(s) has been created, much of the interaction between the host and the managed code in the process is through COM Interop to instances of classes like System.AppDomain or System.Reflection.Assembly.

The primary interfaces described in this document are ICorRuntimeHost and ICorConfiguration. These interfaces serve two primary purposes: they allow an unmanaged host to start and configure the runtime, and they simplify access to the managed classes described above from unmanaged code.