Check if DLL is managed or not

[Siddhartha]

True. But is it foolproof ?

Today it is - tomorrow, who knows - that is why I called it a hack.

On the otherhand - may be we can raise the same question on using a purely PE-based mechanism towards detecting .NET usage? It is theoretically possible for someone to get MSCOREE.DLL into his PE of a non-managed application...

So, may be if one wants to fool-proof his application for a reasonably competent fool, he is better off using both techniques i.e. first look the PE up, and then look the search patterns up?

I mean, how did you arrive at the pattern ?

By analyzing the binary contents of many managed assemblies.

However, I must add that I analyzed the content of assemblies generated by Visual Studio only. It would be interesting to peek into a .NET assembly created by a competing compiler - though, I dare say that there aren't too many assemblies created by non-VS compilers out there.