Where Are We?

The CLR is ultimately just a family of Win32/COM DLLs that one can load into any Win32 process. The primary facade to the CLR is MSCOREE.DLL, which acts as a lightweight shim in front of the actual runtime, which is implemented (primarily) in MSCORWKS.DLL or MSCORSVR.DLL. After the CLR loads your program, it is encouraged to stay within the confines of the CLR's managed execution model; however, you are free to leave at any time simply by invoking an unmanaged method.

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