Differences Between Applications and DLLs

Even though DLLs and applications are both executable program modules, they differ in several ways. To the end-user, the most obvious difference is that DLLs are not programs that can be directly executed. From the system's point of view, there are two fundamental differences between applications and DLLs:

• An application can have multiple instances of itself running in the system simultaneously, whereas a DLL can have only one instance.
• An application can own things such as a stack, global memory, file handles, and a message queue, but a DLL cannot.

What do you want to do?

• Export from a DLL
• Link an executable to a DLL
• Initialize a DLL

What do you want to know more about?

• The advantages of using DLLs
• The different kinds of DLLs available with Visual C++
• Non-MFC DLLs: Overview
• Regular DLLs statically linked to MFC
• Regular DLLs dynamically linked to MFC
• Extension DLLs: Overview
• Which kind of DLL to use

See Also

DLLs