RThomas

• Jan 23rd, 2012

 

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 systems 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.

Above answer taken from website: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d1587c1h%28v=vs.80%29.aspx