Building, Packaging, Deploying, and Administering Applications and Types(Chapter 2 of CLR via C#)

A response file is a text file that contains a set of compiler commandline switches. When you execute CSC.exe, the compiler opens response files and uses any switches that are specified in them as though the switches were passed to CSC.exe on the command line. You instruct the compiler to use a response file by specifying its name on the command line prepended by an @ sign.

A managed PE file has four main parts: the PE32(+) header, the CLR header, the metadata, and the IL.