Load a C# assembly inside a native executable
There are 3 backends:
- CLRHost for Windows (.NET Framework v4.x)
- MonoHost for any platform supporting Mono (Windows/macOS/Linux/etc...)
- CoreCLR for platforms supporting dotnet core
The backends expose the same interface so that it's possible to use them with the same APIs.
The backends share a common interface:
ASMHANDLE clrInit(const char *assemblyPath, const char *baseDir, bool enableDebug)
Loads the assembly specified by assemblyPath, sets the base search directory to baseDir
enableDebug is supported on Windows only (it's ignored on other platforms). If set, the JIT debugger will be invoked
Returns a handle to the loaded assembly
bool clrDeInit(ASMHANDLE handle)
Deinitializes the execution environment (depending on the runtime, it might be impossible to call init again after this)
int runMethod(ASMHANDLE handle, const char *typeName, const char *methodName)
Runs the method methodName inside the class typeName given a handle to the assembly loaded with clrInit
You can use this project inside an executable or a library. You can either link statically against a single loader or you can load them dynamically, so that the CLR engine to use (CLR/CoreCLR/Mono) can be chosen at runtime
This project enables you to call Cygwin code from .NET.
For this use case, the entry point (samples/cli/ezdotnet) MUST be compiled under Cygwin.
In other words, you can call code Cygwin code from .NET only if you're starting with a Cygwin process, and you load .NET afterwards. Starting from Win32 and calling into Cygwin will NOT work
If you're building a shared library, you can inject it into another process to enable it to run .NET code. For this use case you will need to use a library injector There are several tools and ways to achieve this, for example
- Google (Windows: there are dozen injectors available as prebuilt tools)
- Detours (Windows library) has an API to spawn a process with a DLL
- SetSail (Windows: https://github.com/TheAssemblyArmada/SetSail) can inject a DLL at the EXE Entrypoint
- LD_PRELOAD (Linux, FreeBSD, and others) can be used to preload a library in a executable (at launch time)
- ezinject (Linux: https://github.com/smx-smx/ezinject) can inject a library in a running executable