Essential .NET, Volume 1: The Common Language Runtime

Loading the CLR

Getting the CLR to call LoadLibrary or CoCreateInstance is fairly trivial and extremely straightforward. Going in the other direction—that is, allowing CLR-based code to be loaded from legacy code—is considerably more interesting.

Ultimately, the CLR is implemented as a family of Win32/COM-based DLLs. Although one can load these DLLs directly using LoadLibrary or CoCreateInstance, these are not the preferred techniques to use when one is loading the CLR into a new process. Instead, unmanaged programs are encouraged to use the CLR's explicit facilities for loading and hosting the runtime. The CLR exposes these facilities via a DLL called MSCOREE.DLL.

MSCOREE.DLL is sometimes called the “shim” because it is simply a facade in front ...