Starting a CLR Program

An executable CLR program contains at least three components:

  • The user-defined assembly with an entry point

  • The execution system, found in either mscorsvr.dll or mscorwks.dll

  • The basic type system, found in mscorlib.dll

Whenever a CLR program starts, the runtime environment must start, too. One of the first instructions within any CLR executable achieves this task by calling either _CorExeMain or _CorDllMain, both of which are found in mscoree.dll. As its name suggests, mscoree.dll is the initial part of the execution engine. If an executable serves as a program's entry point, then _CorExeMain is called; if it does not, then _CorDllMain is called. Naturally, mscoree.dll is an unmanaged executable, as it needs to interact ...

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