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Reviewing Traditional Win32 Processes

The concept of a “process” has existed within Windows-based operating systems well before the

release of the .NET platform. Simply put, 

process is the term used to describe the set of resources

(such as external code libraries and the primary thread) and the necessary memory allocations used

by a running application. For each *.exe loaded into memory, the OS creates a separate and iso-

lated process for use during its lifetime. Using this approach to application isolation, the result is a

much more robust and stable runtime environment, given that the failure of one process does not

affect the functioning of another.

Now, every Win32 process is assigned a unique process identifier (PID) and may be independ-

ently loaded and unloaded by the OS as necessary (as well as programmatically using Win32 API

calls). As you may be aware, the Processes tab of the Windows Task Manager utility (activated via the

Ctrl+Shift+Esc keystroke combination) allows you to view various statistics regarding the processes

running on a given machine, including its PID and image name (see Figure 17-1).