CLR Hosting Interfaces Added in the .NET Framework 4 and 4.5

This section describes interfaces that unmanaged hosts can use to integrate the common language runtime (CLR) in the .NET Framework 4, .NET Framework 4.5, and later versions into their applications. These interfaces provide methods for a host to configure and load the runtime into a process.

Starting with the .NET Framework 4, all hosting interfaces have the following characteristics:

  • They use lifetime management (AddRef and Release), encapsulation (implicit context) and QueryInterface from COM.

  • They do not use COM types such as BSTR, SAFEARRAY, or VARIANT.

  • There are no apartment models, aggregation, or registry activation that use the CoCreateInstance function.

In This Section

ICLRAppDomainResourceMonitor Interface
Provides methods that inspect an application domain's memory and CPU usage.

ICLRDomainManager Interface
Enables the host to specify the application domain manager that will be used to initialize the default application domain, and to specify initialization properties.

ICLRGCManager2 Interface
Provides the SetGCStartupLimitsEx method, which enables a host to set the size of the garbage collection segment and the maximum size of the garbage collection system's generation 0 to values greater than DWORD.

ICLRMetaHost Interface
Provides methods that return a specific version of the CLR, list all installed CLRs, list all in-process runtimes, return the activation interface, and discover the CLR version used to compile an assembly.

ICLRMetaHostPolicy Interface
Provides the GetRequestedRuntime method that provides a CLR interface based on policy criteria, managed assembly, version, and configuration file.

ICLRRuntimeInfo Interface
Provides methods that return information about a specific runtime, including version, directory, and load status.

ICLRStrongName Interface
Provides basic global static functions for signing assemblies with strong names. All the ICLRStrongName methods return standard COM HRESULTs.

ICLRStrongName2 Interface
Provides the ability to create strong names using the SHA-2 group of Secure Hash Algorithms (SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512).

ICLRTask2 Interface
Provides all the functionality of the ICLRTask Interface; in addition, provides methods that allow thread aborts to be delayed on the current thread.

Deprecated CLR Hosting Interfaces and Coclasses
Describes the hosting interfaces provided with the .NET Framework versions 1.0 and 1.1.

CLR Hosting Interfaces
Describes the hosting interfaces provided with the .NET Framework versions 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5.

Hosting
Introduces hosting in the .NET Framework.