[Mono-devel-list] Seemless Executibles?

[Tom Larsen]

According to an article in MSDN on PE format titled "An In-Depth Look Into
The Win32 Portable Executable File Format" by Matt Pietrek, .NET is tied
in kind of how I decribed:

"Executables produced for the Microsoft .Net environment are first and
foremost PE Files.  However, in most cases normal code and data in a .NET
file are minimal.  The primary purpose of a .NET executable is to get the
.NET-specific information such as metadata and intermediate language (IL)
into memory.  In addition, a .NET executable links against MSCOREE.DLL.
This DLL is the starting point for a .NET process.  When a .NET executable
loads, its entry point is usually a tiny stub of code.  That stub just
jumps to an exported function in MSCOREE.DLL (_CorExeMain or _CorDllMain).