Introduction
This is a quick smash-and-grab type article. Download the code and you'll see how to load a class into a secondary appdomain and use it.
One of the things I miss most about VB6, is the ability to load an object into a separate process, detached from my current process, so if something goes wrong in that object, my main process does not hang (application isolation). In the VB6 world, we create an out of process activex EXE. The .NET way requires us to use Appdomains.
My first read on appdomains left me confused and asking myself "why is this so hard? All I want to do is create an out of process object and use it." After reading Wrox's book "Visual Basic.NET Reflection Handbook", the lights went on and I better understood how these types of things work.
I'm not an expert in this area, but this code will save you some time researching how to create an 'out of process' object the .NET way...
First, you create the app domain:
otherDomain = System.AppDomain.CreateDomain("DuffBeerIsGreatDomain")
Next, you create the object:
Dim herHello As echo.Hello = _
CType(otherDomain.CreateInstanceAndUnwrap("echo", "echo.Hello"), echo.Hello)
Now, invoke a method on the object:
MessageBox.Show(herHello.echo("As createinstanceandunwrap"))
It is *that* simple. Now obviously, there are pitfalls, one of them being that in the above createinstanceandunwrap
call, the echo.Hello
parameter is case sensitive..
The sample code contains example calls which avoid this issue.
Enjoy!
History
- 1st September, 2006: Initial post
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