mscordacwks.dll and mscorwks.dll confusions

Question

What are the different functions mscordacwks.dll and mscorwks.dll performing in .Net framework runtime, build and in debugging process? Are there any recommended readings for this topic? I have searched for quite some time but failed.

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

mscorwks is the main MS CLR implementation.

mscordacwks provides a data-access abstraction over the CLR details, so that debuggers (such as SOS) don't need to know too much about the internals of mscorwks. A discussion is given here.

But in general, you simply don't need to work with these - so unless you're writing your own IDE/debugger, you can probably leave them alone.