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Northglenn, Colorado, United States
I'm primarily a BI Developer on the Microsoft stack. I do sometimes touch upon other Microsoft stacks ( web development, application development, and sql server development).

Friday, September 08, 2006

An Interview Question: Whats the difference between an EXE and DLL?

The distinction between EXE and DLL files is entirely one of semantics. They both use the exact same PE [Portable Executable] format. The only difference is a single bit that indicates if the file should be treated as an EXE or as a DLL. Even the DLL file extension is artificial. You can have DLLs with entirely different extensions—for instance .OCX controls and Control Panel applets (.CPL files) are DLLs.
-- Matt Pietrek

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