Migrating to .NET: A Pragmatic Path to Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ .NET, and ASP.NET By Dhananjay Katre, Prashant Halari, Narayana Rao Surapaneni, Manu Gupta, Meghana Deshpande
Table of Contents
Chapter 10. Dealing with Legacy Components in .NET
The code that runs under .NET environment (CLR) is said to be managed code because the CLR takes care of automatic memory management of the code running under its supervision and also provides us with cross-language capabilities.
The code that runs out of .NET environment (CLR) is said to be unmanaged code. Such code is usually tied to a platform and will not acquire features such as automatic memory management, and so on. Microsoft .NET Framework permits us to move between managed and unmanaged code.