.net - Why is an assembly .exe file?

Question

Assembly in .net Framework is, as I understand, intermediate language file + some metadata, manifest and maybe something else.

CLR translates an assembly to the machine code, which can be executed on the given local machine.

That means that assembly shouldn't be executable by the machine before being processed by CLR. If it's so, then why does it have .exe extension, which is executable on Windows machines?

Answer 1

Since Windows needs to create a process and the first thing .exe will do is to host CLR by loading mscoree.

From CLR via C#:

After Windows has examined the EXE file's header to determine whether to create a 32-bit process, a 64-bit process, or a WoW64 process, Windows loads the x86, x64, or IA64 version of MSCorEE.dll into the process's address space. On an x86 version of Windows, the x86 version of MSCorEE.dll can be found in the C:WindowsSystem32 directory. On an x64 or IA64 version of Windows, the x86 version of MSCorEE.dll can be found in the C:Windows SysWow64 directory, whereas the 64-bit version (x64 or IA64) can be found in the C:WindowsSystem32 directory (for backward compatibility reasons). Then, the process' primary thread calls a method defined inside MSCorEE.dll. This method initializes the CLR, loads the EXE assembly, and then calls its entry point method (Main). At this point, the managed application is up and running.