I recently had a customer who was interested in the development environment and platform used for the development of the solution I was presenting. The question was simply this: Is thus product developed in managed or un-managed code (sometimes referred to as native code). At the time, I had to park the question with a commitment to come back to the customer at a later date. I didn’t really know the difference between the two, more importantly, I didn’t understand the motivation behind the question.
To understand the differences, I decided to take a cursory look at Microsoft’s C# language(an example of managed code, pronounced C Sharp) and also revised some of my old C++ (example of unmanaged/native- mostly) books. Using Visual Studio from Microsoft it’s possible to create applications in both languages. To see C# in action, I created a small app to read and manipulate some local windows registry […]