Note: This article was originally published in August 2004 on 15Seconds.com, but it has gotten good reviews, and the techniques, I believe, are still valid.  I hope the readers of ASPAlliance find it as useful as I have.

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In the first part of this series, we covered what it is that the .NET Service Manager does as well as how to install and configure managed services to run under it. In this part, we're going to cover the details of how the .NET Service Manager works, that is, how it enables the great features such as drag-n-drop deployment. Many of the concepts behind this can be abstracted to apply to other .NET projects you may work on.

There are a few core technologies that made this facility possible, which are .NET Remoting, AppDomains, Reflection, shadow copy, and other standard object-oriented practices like classes and interfaces. The key technology that enables the dynamic loading and, more importantly, unloading of assemblies is Remoting; it allows us to completely load, host, and run code in an isolated part of memory (an application domain, a.k.a., AppDomain) that for all intents and purposes acts like a standard Windows process.