 <p>Personally I found Stephen Toub's article to be the best source regarding constrained execution regions: <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx#S2" rel="nofollow">Using the Reliability Features of the .NET Framework</a>. And in the end CER are the bread and butter of any fault tolerant code so this article contains pretty much everything you need to know, explained in a clear and concise way.</p> <p>That being said you could rather choose to favor a more radical design where you immediately resort to the destruction of the application domain (or depend on this pattern when the CLR is hosted). You could look at the bulkhead pattern for example (and maybe the <a href="http://www.reactivemanifesto.org/" rel="nofollow">reactive manifesto</a> if you're interested on this pattern and facing complex data flows).</p> <p>That being said, the "let it fail" approach can backfire if you cannot completely recover after that, as <a href="https://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane5rep.html" rel="nofollow">demonstrated by Ariane V</a>.</p>