Is it possible in any way to reference and use classes and methods from a managed .net assembly from a fully unmanaged C ++ application? (no / clr)
Absolutely, and this gem from CodeProject should prove useful
You need CCW (COM Callable Wrapper).
You can - by hosting the CLR. I found one set of code examples here . I have no way of knowing how good the advice is, though, like I never did.
You can expose the .NET class through COM and use the classes through COM.