Originally Posted by
TheRaven
When you publish a C# application or .dll all you are really publishing is a shopping list for the .Net Framework to fill via mscoree.dll. mscoree.dll takes your .exe file like a book and reads its manifest, .rsp, and meta-data and prepares it for the JIT (Jitter) in the .Net Framework. The Jitter then accesses the .Net Base Classes library and assembles your application in byte code on the fly. This is the same way Python is handled with Idle the python interpreter.